blob: 5bbc921c0a708ca9aefc56a1226c7ed4e56052d9 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000013- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
14 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
15
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000016- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000017 an ferror() call.
18
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000019- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
20 list.sort().
21
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000022- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
23 (2+3) --> (5).
24
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000025- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
26
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000027- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
28 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000029
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000030- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
31 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
32 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
33
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000034Extension Modules
35-----------------
36
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +000037- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
38
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +000039- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
40 {remove_history,replace_history}
41
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +000042- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
43 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +000044
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +000045- stat_float_times is now True.
46
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000047- array.array objects are now picklable.
48
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000049- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
50 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
51
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000052- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
53 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
54 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
55
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +000056- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
57 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000058
59Library
60-------
61
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +000062- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
63
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +000064- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
65
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +000066- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
67
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +000068- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
69
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +000070- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
71
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +000072- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
73
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +000074- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
75 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
76 be exploited in various ways.
77
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +000078- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
79
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +000080- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
81
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +000082- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
83
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000084- Enhancements to the csv module:
85
86 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
87 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
88 PEP 305.
89 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
90 reporting.
91 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
92 dictates.
93 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +000094 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +000095 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +000096 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
97 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +000098 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
99 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000100 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000101 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
102 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
103 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
104 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
105 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
106 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
107 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
108 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
109 without first creating a dialect class.
110 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
111 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
112 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000113 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000114 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
115 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000116 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
117 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
118 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
119 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000120 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
121 This has been fixed.
122
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000123- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
124 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
125 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
126 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
127
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000128- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
129
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000130- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
131 (Bug #951915).
132
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000133- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
134 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
135 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
136 encoding alias table
137
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000138- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
139
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000140- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
141 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
142
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000143- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
144
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000145- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
146
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000147- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
148
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000149- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
150
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000151- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
152
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000153- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
154 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
155 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
156
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000157- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000158 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000159
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000160- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
161 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
162 tokenizer with very long source lines.
163
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000164- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
165 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
166
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000167- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
168 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000169
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000170- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
171 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
172
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000173Build
174-----
175
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000176- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
177 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
178
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000179- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
180 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
181 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
182 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
183 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
184 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
185 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
186 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
187
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000188- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
189 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
190 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
191 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
192
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000193
194C API
195-----
196
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000197- Removed PyRange_New().
198
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000199
200Tests
201-----
202
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000203- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000204
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000205
206Documentation
207-------------
208
209- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
210 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
211 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
212
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000213Mac
214---
215
216
217
218Tools/Demos
219-----------
220
221
222
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000223What's New in Python 2.4 final?
224===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000225
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000226*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000227
228Core and builtins
229-----------------
230
231- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
232 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
233 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
234
235
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000236What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
237==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000238
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000239*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000240
241Core and builtins
242-----------------
243
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000244- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
245 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
246 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
247
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000248
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000249Library
250-------
251
252- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
253 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
254 raised is re-raised.
255
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000256- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
257 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
258
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000259- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
260 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
261 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
262 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
263 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
264 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
265 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
266 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
267 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
268 by the slice are recomputed now.
269
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000270- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000271
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000272Build
273-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000274
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000275- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
276 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
277 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000278
279C API
280-----
281
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000282- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
283
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000284
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000285What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
286================================
287
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000288*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000289
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000290License
291-------
292
293The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
294is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
295changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
296Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
297intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
298durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
299the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
300License::
301
302 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
303
304says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
305to Python 2.1.1.
306
307The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
308License Version 2.
309
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000310Core and builtins
311-----------------
312
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000313- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
314 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
315 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
316 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
317 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
318 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
319 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
320 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
321 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
322 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
323
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000324- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000325
326Extension Modules
327-----------------
328
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000329- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
330 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
331 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
332 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000333
334Library
335-------
336
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000337- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
338 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
339 returned.
340
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000341- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
342
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000343- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
344 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
345
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000346- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
347
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000348- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
349 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000350
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000351- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
352
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000353- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
354
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000355- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000356 the source code is updated and reloaded.
357
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000358Build
359-----
360
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000361- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000362
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000363What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
364================================
365
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000366*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000367
368Core and builtins
369-----------------
370
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000371- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000372 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
373
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000374- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
375 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
376 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
377 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
378
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000379- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
380 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
381
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000382- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
383 constant.
384
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000385- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
386 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
387 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
388 large), and to anomalies such as
389 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
390 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
391 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
392 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000393
394Extension modules
395-----------------
396
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000397- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
398 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000399 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
400 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
401 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000402
403Library
404-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000405
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000406- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000407 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000408 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
409 --swig-cpp.
410
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000411- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
412 it is set.
413
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000414- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000415
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000416- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
417 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
418 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
419 Closes bug #1039270.
420
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000421- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000422
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000423 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000424 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
425 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
426 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
427 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
428 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
429 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
430 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
431 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
432 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
433 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
434 + Updates to documentation.
435
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000436- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
437 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
438 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
439 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
440
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000441- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000442
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000443- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
444 applications should use the getmember function.
445
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000446- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
447
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000448- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
449 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
450 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
451 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
452 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
453 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
454 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
455 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
456 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
457
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000458- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
459 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000460 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000461
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000462- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
463 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
464 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
465 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
466 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
467 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
468 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
469 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000470
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000471- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
472 the new public features (of which there are many).
473
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000474- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000475 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
476 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
477 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
478 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000479 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000480
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000481- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
482
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000483- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
484 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
485 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
486 options.
487
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000488- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
489 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
490 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
491 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
492 conditions under which non-string values work.
493
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000494Build
495-----
496
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000497- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
498 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
499 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
500
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000501- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
502 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
503 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
504 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
505 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000506
507C API
508-----
509
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000510- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
511 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
512
513- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
514
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000515- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
516 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
517 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
518 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
519 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
520 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
521 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
522 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
523 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
524
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000525- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
526
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000527- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
528 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
529 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000530
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000531Tests
532-----
533
534- test__locale ported to unittest
535
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000536Mac
537---
538
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000539- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
540 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
541 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000542
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000543Tools/Demos
544-----------
545
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000546- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
547 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
548 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
549 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
550 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000551
552
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000553What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
554=================================
555
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000556*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000557
558Core and builtins
559-----------------
560
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000561- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000562 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
563
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000564- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
565 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
566 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
567 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
568 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
569 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
570 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
571 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000572 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
573 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
574 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
575 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
576 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000577
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000578- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
579 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
580 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
581 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
582 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
583
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000584- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
585
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000586- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
587 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
588
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000589- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
590 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
591 modified the list.
592
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000593- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
594 functions is now writable.
595
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000596- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
597 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
598 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
599 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
600
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000601- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
602 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
603 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
604 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
605 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000606
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000607- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
608 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
609
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000610Extension modules
611-----------------
612
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000613- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
614
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000615- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
616 data.
617
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000618- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
619 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
620 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
621 supposed to have been truncated away.
622
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000623- Added socket.socketpair().
624
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000625- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
626 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
627
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000628- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000629 versions of Python, have now been removed.
630
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000631Library
632-------
633
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000634- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000635 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000636
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000637- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
638 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
639
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000640- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
641 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
642
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000643- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
644
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000645- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
646 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000647
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000648- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
649 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
650
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000651- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
652
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000653- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
654
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000655- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
656
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000657- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
658 Percivall.
659
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000660- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
661 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
662
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000663- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
664 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
665 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000666 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000667
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000668- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
669 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
670 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
671 and exponent.
672
673- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
674
675- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
676 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
677 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
678
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000679- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
680 to the readline module.
681
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000682- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000683 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
684 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000685
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000686- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
687 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
688 contains symlinks.
689
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000690- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
691 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
692
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000693- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
694 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
695 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
696
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000697- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
698 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
699 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
700 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
701 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
702 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
703 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
704 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
705 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
706 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
707 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
708 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
709 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
710
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000711- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
712
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000713Tools/Demos
714-----------
715
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000716- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
717 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
718
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000719- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
720
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000721Build
722-----
723
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000724- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
725 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
726 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
727 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
728 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
729 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
730 plans to do so.
731
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000732- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
733 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
734
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000735- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
736 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
737
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000738- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
739 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
740
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000741- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
742 GNU/k*BSD systems.
743
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000744- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
745 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
746
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000747C API
748-----
749
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000750..
751
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000752Documentation
753-------------
754
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000755- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
756 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
757
758- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
759 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
760 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000761
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000762New platforms
763-------------
764
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000765- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
766
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000767Tests
768-----
769
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000770..
771
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000772Windows
773-------
774
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000775- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
776 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
777 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
778 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
779 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
780 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
781 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
782 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
783 the problem.
784
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000785Mac
786---
787
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000788..
789
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000790
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000791What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
792=================================
793
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000794*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000795
796Core and builtins
797-----------------
798
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000799- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
800 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
801 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
802 sensitive code.
803
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000804- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000805 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000806
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000807 @staticmethod
808 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000809
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000810 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000811
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000812- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
813 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
814 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
815 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
816 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
817 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
818 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
819 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
820 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
821 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
822 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
823
824 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
825 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
826 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
827 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
828 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
829 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
830 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
831
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000832- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
833 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
834
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000835- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000836 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000837
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000838- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000839 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000840 which was missing for no apparent reason.
841
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000842- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000843 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
844 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
845
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000846- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
847 types that support garbage collection.
848
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000849- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
850
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000851- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
852 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
853 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
854 Jython.
855
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000856- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
857
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000858- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
859 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
860
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000861- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
862 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
863 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000864
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000865- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
866 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
867 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
868
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000869Extension modules
870-----------------
871
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000872- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
873
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000874Library
875-------
876
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000877- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
878 TIS-620
879
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000880- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
881 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
882 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
883 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
884 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
885 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
886 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
887 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
888 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
889 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
890
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000891- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
892
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000893- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
894 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
895 same as when the argument is omitted).
896 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
897
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000898- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
899
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000900- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
901 schemes are offered.
902
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000903- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
904
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000905- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
906 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
907 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
908
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000909- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
910
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000911- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
912 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
913
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000914- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
915 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
916 when dummy_threading is being used.
917
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000918- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
919 from a tarfile.
920
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000921- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000922 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000923
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000924- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
925 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
926 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
927 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
928
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000929- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
930 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
931
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000932- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
933 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
934 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
935 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
936 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
937 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
938 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
939 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
940 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
941 by some other method in progress).
942
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000943- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
944 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
945 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000946
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000947- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
948
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000949- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
950 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
951 AM Kuchling.
952
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000953- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
954 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
955 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
956
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000957- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
958 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
959 instead of unsigned.
960
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000961- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000962 no longer part of the public API.
963
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000964- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
965 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
966 string methods of the same name).
967
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000968- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000969 SF patch 945642.
970
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000971- doctest unittest integration improvements:
972
973 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
974
975 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
976 DocTestSuites.
977
978- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
979 that provide thread-local data.
980
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000981- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
982 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
983
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000984- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
985
986- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
987 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
988 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
989
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000990- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
991
992 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
993 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
994 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000995
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000996 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
997 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
998 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
999 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1000
1001 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1002 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1003
1004 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1005 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1006 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1007 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1008
1009 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1010 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1011 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1012 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1013 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1014
1015 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1016 wrapping help output.
1017
1018 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1019 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1020 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001021
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001022C API
1023-----
1024
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001025- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1026 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1027 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1028 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1029 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1030 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1031 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1032 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1033 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1034 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1035 its visible semantics have not changed.
1036
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001037- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1038 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1039
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001040Documentation
1041-------------
1042
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001043- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001044
1045 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001046 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001047
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001048 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001049
1050 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1051
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001052- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001053
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001054Tests
1055-----
1056
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001057- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001058 platforms that use the Makefile.
1059
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001060- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1061 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1062 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1063
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001064
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001065What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1066=================================
1067
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001068*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001069
1070Core and builtins
1071-----------------
1072
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001073- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1074 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1075 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1076 objects now (one object instead of three).
1077
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001078- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1079 Windows DLLs.
1080
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001081- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1082 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001083
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001084- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1085 a new .pyc magic.
1086
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001087- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1088 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1089 be there.
1090
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001091- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1092 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1093 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1094
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001095- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1096 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1097 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1098
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001099- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1100
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001101- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1102 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1103 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001104
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001105- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1106 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1107
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001108- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1109
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001110- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001111 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001112
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001113- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1114
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001115- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1116
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001117- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1118 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1119
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001120- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1121 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1122 Fixes bug #858016 .
1123
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001124- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1125 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1126 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1127
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001128- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1129 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1130 improves their performance (about 35%).
1131
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001132- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1133 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1134 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1135
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001136- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1137 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1138 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1139 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1140
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001141- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1142 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1143 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1144 length is not known).
1145
1146- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1147 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001148 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1149 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001150 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1151
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001152- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1153 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1154
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001155- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1156 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1157 keyword arguments.
1158
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001159- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1160 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1161 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1162
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001163- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1164 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1165 cases.
1166
1167- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1168 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1169 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1170 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1171 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1172 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1173 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1174 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1175 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1176 a release build.
1177
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001178- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1179 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1180
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001181- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001182 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001183
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001184- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1185 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1186 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1187 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1188 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1189 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1190 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1191 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1192 destroyed.
1193
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001194- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1195 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1196 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1197 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1198 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1199 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1200 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1201 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1202
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001203- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1204 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1205 character other than a space.
1206
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001207- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1208 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1209 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1210 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1211 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1212 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1213 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1214 attributes with the same name.
1215
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001216- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1217 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1218 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1219 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1220 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1221 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1222 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1223 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1224 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1225 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1226 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1227 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1228 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1229 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001230
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001231- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1232 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1233 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1234 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1235 This has been repaired.
1236
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001237- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1238
1239- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1240
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001241- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1242 over a sequence.
1243
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001244- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001245 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001246
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001247- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1248
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001249- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1250 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1251 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1252 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1253 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1254 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1255 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1256 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1257
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001258- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1259 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1260 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1261
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001262- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1263 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1264 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1265 freelist.
1266
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001267- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1268 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1269
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001270- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1271 number.
1272
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001273- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1274 a TypeError exception.
1275
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001276- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1277 820195.
1278
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001279- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1280 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1281 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1282
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001283- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001284 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1285 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001286
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001287- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1288 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1289 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1290
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001291- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1292 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001293 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001294
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001295- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001296 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1297 the first call.
1298
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001299
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001300Extension modules
1301-----------------
1302
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001303- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1304 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1305
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001306- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1307 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1308 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1309 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1310 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1311 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1312 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001313
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001314- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1315
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001316- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1317
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001318- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1319 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1320
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001321- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1322 fewer false positives.
1323
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001324- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1325 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1326
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001327- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001328 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1329
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001330- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001331 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001332 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001333 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1334 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001335
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001336- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1337 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1338 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1339 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1340
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001341- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1342 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1343 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1344 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1345 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1346 #897625.
1347
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001348- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1349 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1350
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001351- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1352 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1353 and pops on either side of the deque.
1354
1355- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1356 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1357
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001358- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1359 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1360 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1361 other functions that expect a function argument.
1362
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001363- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1364
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001365- os.getsid was added.
1366
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001367- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1368 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1369 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1370
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001371- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1372
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001373- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1374
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001375- readline.clear_history was added.
1376
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001377- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1378
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001379- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1380
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001381- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1382
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001383- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1384
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001385- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1386
1387- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1388
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001389- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1390
1391- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1392
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001393- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1394 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1395 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1396
1397- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1398 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1399 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1400 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1401 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1402 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1403 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1404
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001405- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1406 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1407 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1408 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001409
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001410- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001411 iterators from a single iterable.
1412
1413- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1414 of raising a TypeError exception.
1415
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001416- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1417 as parameter.
1418
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001419Library
1420-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001421
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001422- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1423 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1424 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001425
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001426- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1427 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1428 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001429
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001430- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001431
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001432- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1433 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001434
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001435- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1436 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1437
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001438- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1439
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001440- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001441 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001442
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001443- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001444 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001445
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001446- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1447
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001448- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1449 on cygwin and mingw32.
1450
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001451- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1452
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001453- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1454 module.
1455
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001456- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1457 installation scheme for all platforms.
1458
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001459- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001460 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001461
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001462- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1463 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1464 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1465
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001466- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1467 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1468 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1469
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001470- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1471
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001472- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1473
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001474- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1475 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1476
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001477- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1478 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1479 type pattern with the same value exists.
1480
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001481- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1482 when run from the command prompt).
1483
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001484- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1485 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1486
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001487- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1488 default sort).
1489
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001490- Added global runctx function to profile module
1491
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001492- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1493
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001494- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1495
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001496- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1497
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001498- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001499 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1500 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1501 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1502 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1503 accordingly.
1504
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001505- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1506 decoding standards.
1507
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001508- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1509 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1510 called for all requests.
1511
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001512- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1513 they are passed to the compiler.
1514
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001515- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1516 indent, width and depth.
1517
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001518- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1519 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1520
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001521- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1522 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1523
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001524- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1525
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001526- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1527
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001528- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1529
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001530- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1531 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1532
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001533- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001534 for better performance.
1535
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001536- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001537
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001538- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1539 a string).
1540
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001541- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1542
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001543- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1544
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001545- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1546
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001547- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1548
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001549- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1550 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1551 list of fieldnames.
1552
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001553- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1554 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1555
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001556- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1557
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001558- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1559 empty lists.
1560
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001561- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1562 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1563 and shelves.
1564
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001565- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1566 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1567
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001568- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001569 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1570 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001571
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001572- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1573 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001574 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001575
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001576- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001577 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1578 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1579
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001580- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1581 and removed in Py2.4.
1582
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001583- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1584
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001585- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1586
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001587Tools/Demos
1588-----------
1589
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001590- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1591 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1592
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001593- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1594
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001595- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1596 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1597 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1598 destination in situations where both files are given.
1599
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001600- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1601 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1602 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1603 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1604
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001605- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1606
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001607- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1608 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1609 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1610 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1611 now.
1612
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001613- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1614 in effect
1615
1616- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1617 C-c C-h
1618
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001619- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1620 -d option was given.
1621
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001622Build
1623-----
1624
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001625- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1626 build under OS X.
1627
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001628- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1629 --enable-profiling.
1630
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001631- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1632 is configured --with-tsc.
1633
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001634- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1635 on AMD64.
1636
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001637- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1638 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1639
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001640- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1641 removed.
1642
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001643- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1644 supported (see PEP 11).
1645
1646- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1647
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001648- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1649
1650- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1651 (see PEP 11).
1652
1653- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1654 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1655
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001656C API
1657-----
1658
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001659- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1660 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1661 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1662
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001663- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1664 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1665 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1666 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1667
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001668- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1669 generator objects.
1670
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001671- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1672 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001673 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1674 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001675
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001676- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1677 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1678
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001679- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1680 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1681 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1682 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1683 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1684
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001685- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1686 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1687 about 10% faster.
1688
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001689- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1690 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1691
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001692- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1693 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1694 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1695 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1696
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001697Windows
1698-------
1699
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001700- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1701 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1702 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1703 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1704
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001705- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1706 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1707 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1708
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001709
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001710What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1711===============================
1712
1713*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1714
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001715IDLE
1716----
1717
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001718- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1719 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1720 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1721 context-menu actions.
1722
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001723- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1724 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1725 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1726 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1727 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1728 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1729 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1730 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1731 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1732
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001733
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001734What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1735=============================================
1736
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001737*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001738
1739Core and builtins
1740-----------------
1741
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001742- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001743 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001744 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1745
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001746Extension modules
1747-----------------
1748
1749- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1750 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1751 than once. This has been fixed.
1752
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001753- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1754 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1755 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1756 call.
1757
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001758- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1759
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001760Library
1761-------
1762
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001763- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1764 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1765
1766- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1767 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1768 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1769 restored.
1770
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001771IDLE
1772----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001773
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001774- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001775
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001776Build
1777-----
1778
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001779- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1780 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1781
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001782C API
1783-----
1784
1785Windows
1786-------
1787
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001788- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1789 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1790
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001791- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1792
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001793Mac
1794---
1795
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001796- Various fixes to pimp.
1797
1798- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1799
1800- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1801 more problems than it solves.
1802
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001803
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001804What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1805=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001806
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001807*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1808
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001809Core and builtins
1810-----------------
1811
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001812- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1813 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1814
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001815- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1816 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001817 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001818
1819- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1820 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1821 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001822 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001823
1824- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1825 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001826
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001827- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1828 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1829 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1830
1831- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001832 770247.
1833
1834- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001835
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001836Extension modules
1837-----------------
1838
1839- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1840 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1841
1842- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1843
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001844- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1845
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001846- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1847 contained within the _strptime module.
1848
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001849- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1850 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1851
1852- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001853 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1854
1855- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1856 the find_class attribute, if present.
1857
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001858- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001859
1860 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1861 (SF bug 763298).
1862
1863 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001864 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1865 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1866 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001867
1868 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1869
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001870Library
1871-------
1872
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001873- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1874
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001875- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1876 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1877 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1878 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1879 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1880 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1881 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1882 or Tester().
1883
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001884- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1885 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1886 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1887 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1888 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1889 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1890 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1891 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1892 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001893
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001894 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001895
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001896- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1897 weren't before was an oversight.
1898
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001899- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1900 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1901
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001902- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1903 when there are no lines.
1904
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001905- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1906 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1907
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001908- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1909 to child processes.
1910
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001911- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1912
1913- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1914
1915- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1916 xmlrpclib.
1917
1918- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1919 responses.
1920
1921- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1922 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1923
1924- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1925 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1926 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1927
1928- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1929 used as patterns.
1930
1931- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1932 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1933 than Tk 8.3.
1934
1935- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1936
1937- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001938
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001939Tools/Demos
1940-----------
1941
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001942- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1943
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001944- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1945
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001946- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001947
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001948Build
1949-----
1950
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001951- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1952
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001953- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1954
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001955- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1956 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001957
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001958- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1959 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1960 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001961
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001962C API
1963-----
1964
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001965- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1966 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1967
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001968Windows
1969-------
1970
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001971- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1972 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1973 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1974 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1975 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1976 Python exception ::
1977
1978 thread.error: can't start new thread
1979
1980 is raised now.
1981
1982- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1983 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1984 instead of from DLL teardown.
1985
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001986Mac
1987---
1988
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001989- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001990 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001991 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1992 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1993 the executable in the bundle.
1994
1995- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001996
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001997- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1998
1999- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2000 on Panther.
2001
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002002What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2003================================
2004
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002005*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002006
2007Core and builtins
2008-----------------
2009
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002010- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2011 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2012 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2013 with the -i option.
2014
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002015- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2016 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2017
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002018- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2019 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2020
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002021- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2022 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2023 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2024 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2025 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2026 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2027 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2028 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2029 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2030 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2031 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2032 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2033 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002034
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002035- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2036 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2037 embedded in a lambda expression.
2038
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002039- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2040 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2041 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2042 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2043 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2044
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002045- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2046 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2047 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2048
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002049- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2050 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2051
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002052- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2053 It's writable again.
2054
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002055- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2056 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2057 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002058 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002059
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002060- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2061 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2062 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2063
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002064Extension modules
2065-----------------
2066
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002067- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2068 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2069
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002070- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2071 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2072 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2073 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2074
2075- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2076 collection.
2077
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002078- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2079 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2080 unique within a single program run.
2081
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002082- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2083 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2084
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002085- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2086 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2087
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002088- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2089 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002090
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002091- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2092
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002093- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2094 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2095
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002096- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2097 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2098 for many BSD-derived systems.
2099
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002100
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002101Library
2102-------
2103
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002104- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2105 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2106 primary ones:
2107
2108 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2109 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2110 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2111
2112 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2113 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2114 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2115 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2116 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2117 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2118
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002119- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2120 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2121 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2122 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2123 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2124 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2125 argument.
2126
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002127- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2128 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2129 in the archive.
2130
2131- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2132 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2133
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002134- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2135 569574).
2136
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002137- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2138 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2139 no more.
2140
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002141- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2142 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2143 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2144 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2145 code coverage.
2146
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002147- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2148 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2149 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002150 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2151 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002152
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002153- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2154 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2155 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002156 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002157
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002158- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2159
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002160- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2161 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2162 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2163 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2164
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002165- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2166 handling.
2167
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002168- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2169 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2170
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002171- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2172 in socket.py.
2173
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002174- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2175
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002176- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2177 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2178 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2179 opener with proxy support.
2180
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002181- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2182
2183- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2184
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002185Tools/Demos
2186-----------
2187
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002188- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2189
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002190- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2191
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002192- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2193 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002194
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002195- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2196 files.
2197
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002198Build
2199-----
2200
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002201- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002202 different root directory.
2203
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002204C API
2205-----
2206
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002207- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2208 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2209 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2210 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2211 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2212 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2213 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2214 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2215 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2216 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2217
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002218- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2219 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2220 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2221 from Python.
2222
2223
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002224New platforms
2225-------------
2226
2227None this time.
2228
2229Tests
2230-----
2231
2232- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2233 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2234
2235Windows
2236-------
2237
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002238- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2239
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002240- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2241 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2242 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2243 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2244 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2245 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2246 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2247 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2248 that's what it's for.
2249
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002250Mac
2251---
2252
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002253- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2254 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2255 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2256 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002257- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2258 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2259- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002260
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002261SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2262------------------------------------
2263
2264430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2265598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2266622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2267661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2268683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2269697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2270713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2271724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2272727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2273729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2274730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2275731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2276732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2277733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2278735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2279740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2280744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2281745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2282747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2283749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2284751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2285753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2286755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2287757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2288760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2289
2290
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002291What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2292================================
2293
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002294*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002295
2296Core and builtins
2297-----------------
2298
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002299- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2300 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2301
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002302- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2303 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2304 and cannot be strings).
2305
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002306- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2307 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2308 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2309 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2310
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002311- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2312 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2313 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2314 Python itself.
2315
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002316- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2317 the referenced object, if it has one.
2318
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002319- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2320 the thread started at
2321 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2322
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002323- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2324 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2325 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2326 placed on a list index.
2327
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002328- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2329 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2330 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2331 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2332
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002333- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2334 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2335 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2336 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2337 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2338 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2339 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2340
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002341- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2342 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2343 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2344 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2345 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2346
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002347- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2348 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002349
2350- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2351 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2352 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2353 #693195.)
2354
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002355- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2356 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002357
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002358- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002359 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002360 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2361 interpreter executions, would fail.
2362
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002363- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002364 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002365 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002366
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002367Extension modules
2368-----------------
2369
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002370- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2371 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2372 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2373 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2374
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002375- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2376 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2377
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002378- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2379 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2380 and Greg Chapman.)
2381
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002382- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2383 recursively.
2384
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002385- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002386 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2387 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2388 leaks.
2389
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002390- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2391
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002392- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2393 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2394 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2395 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2396 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2397 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2398 #705836.
2399
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002400- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002401 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2402
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002403- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2404 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2405 See SF bug #692416.
2406
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002407- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2408 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2409
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002410- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2411 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2412 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002413
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002414- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002415 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2416 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2417
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002418- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2419 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2420 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2421 timeouts to work properly.
2422
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002423Library
2424-------
2425
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002426- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2427 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2428 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2429 future release.
2430
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002431- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2432 for querying platform dependent features.
2433
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002434- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002435
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002436- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2437 pickle protocol versions.
2438
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002439- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2440 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2441 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2442
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002443- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2444
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002445- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2446 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2447 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2448 modules.
2449
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002450- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2451 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2452 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2453
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002454- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2455 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2456
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002457- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2458 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2459 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2460
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002461- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002462 MS Office extensions.
2463
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002464- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2465 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2466
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002467- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2468 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2469
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002470- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2471 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2472 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2473 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2474 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2475 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2476
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002477- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2478 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2479 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002480
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002481- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2482 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2483 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2484
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002485- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2486
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002487- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2488 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2489 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2490
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002491Tools/Demos
2492-----------
2493
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002494- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2495 See the module docstring for details.
2496
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002497Build
2498-----
2499
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002500- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2501 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002502
2503C API
2504-----
2505
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002506- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2507
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002508- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2509 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2510 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2511
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002512- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2513 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002514
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002515 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2516 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2517 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002518
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002519- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002520 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2521
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002522- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2523 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2524 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002525
2526New platforms
2527-------------
2528
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002529None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002530
2531Tests
2532-----
2533
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002534- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2535 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002536
2537Windows
2538-------
2539
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002540- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2541 function.
2542
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002543- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2544 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002545
2546Mac
2547---
2548
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002549- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2550 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002551
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002552- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2553 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002554
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002555- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2556 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2557 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002558
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002559- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002560 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2561 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002562
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002563- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2564 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002565
2566
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002567What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2568=================================
2569
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002570*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002571
2572Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002573-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002574
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002575- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2576 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2577 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2578
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002579- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2580 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2581 (SF patch #664376.)
2582
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002583- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2584 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2585 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2586 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2587 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2588 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002589 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002590
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002591- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2592 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2593 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2594 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002595 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002596
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002597- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2598 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2599 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2600 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2601 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2602 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2603 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2604 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2605 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2606 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2607 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2608
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002609- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2610 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2611 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2612 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2613 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2614 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2615
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002616- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2617 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2618
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002619- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2620 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2621 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2622 case.)
2623
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002624- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2625 passed as unicode strings.
2626
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002627- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2628 See SF bug #683467.
2629
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002630- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2631 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2632
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002633- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2634
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002635- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2636
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002637- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2638 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2639 arguments.
2640
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002641- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2642 See SF bug #667147.
2643
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002644- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002645 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002646 See SF bug #676155.
2647
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002648- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002649 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002650 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2651 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2652 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2653 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2654 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2655 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002656
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002657Extension modules
2658-----------------
2659
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002660- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2661 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2662 tp_as_number pointer.
2663
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002664- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2665 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2666 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2667 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2668 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2669
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002670- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2671
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002672- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2673
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002674- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002675 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002676 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2677 patch #678531.)
2678
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002679- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2680 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2681
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002682- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2683 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2684
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002685- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2686
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002687- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2688 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2689 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2690
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002691- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2692
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002693- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2694 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2695
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002696- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002697
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002698- datetime changes:
2699
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002700 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2701
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002702 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2703 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2704 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2705 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2706 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2707 now.
2708
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002709 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002710 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2711 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002712
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002713 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002714 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002715 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2716 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2717 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2718 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002719
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002720 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2721 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2722 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002723 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2724
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002725 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2726 by a later example coded by Guido.
2727
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002728 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002729 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2730 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2731 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002732 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2733 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2734
2735 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2736 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2737 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2738 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2739 tzinfo subclass instance.
2740
2741 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2742 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2743 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2744 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2745 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2746 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2747 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2748 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002749
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002750 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2751 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2752 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2753 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2754 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002755 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2756
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002757 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002758
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002759 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2760 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2761 as a naive datetime object.
2762
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002763 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2764 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2765 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2766
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002767 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2768 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2769 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2770 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2771 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2772 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2773 comparison.
2774
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002775 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2776 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2777 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2778 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002779 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002780
2781 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002782
2783 and ::
2784
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002785 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2786
2787 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2788 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2789 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2790 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2791
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002792 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2793 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2794 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2795 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2796 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2797
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002798 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2799 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002800 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2801 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002802
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002803Library
2804-------
2805
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002806- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2807 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2808
2809- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2810 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2811 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2812 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2813 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2814 See PEP 307 for details.
2815
2816- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2817 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2818
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002819- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2820 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002821 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002822 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2823 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002824 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002825
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002826- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2827 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2828
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002829- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2830 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2831 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2832
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002833- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2834
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002835- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2836 exception.
2837
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002838- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2839 class.
2840
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002841- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2842 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2843 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2844
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002845- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2846 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2847
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002848- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002849 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2850 See SF bug #659228.
2851
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002852- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2853 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2854 See SF patch #651082.
2855
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002856- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002857
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002858- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2859 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2860
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002861- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002862 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002863
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002864- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2865 DOS paths from other platforms.
2866
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002867Tools/Demos
2868-----------
2869
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002870- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2871 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2872 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2873 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2874 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2875 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2876 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2877 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2878 example:
2879
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002880 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2881 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002882
2883 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2884
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002885
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002886Build
2887-----
2888
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002889- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2890 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2891 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002892 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2893
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002894 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2895
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002896- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2897 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2898 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2899 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2900 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2901 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2902 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2903 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2904 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2905
2906- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2907 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2908 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2909 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2910
2911- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2912 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2913
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002914C API
2915-----
2916
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002917- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2918 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002919
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002920- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2921 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2922 tp_as_number pointer.
2923
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002924- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2925 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2926 (SF #681367)
2927
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002928- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2929 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2930 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2931 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002932
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002933Tests
2934-----
2935
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002936- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002937 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2938 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2939 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2940 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2941 pydoc.)
2942
2943- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2944
2945- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002946
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002947Windows
2948-------
2949
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002950- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2951 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2952 time).
2953
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002954- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2955 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2956
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002957- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2958 release without strong cryptography.
2959
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002960- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002961 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002962
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002963- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2964 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2965
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002966Mac
2967---
2968
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002969- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2970 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002971
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002972- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2973 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2974 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002975
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002976- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2977 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002978
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002979- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2980 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2981 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2982 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002983
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002984- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002985 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2986 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2987 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002988
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002989
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002990What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002991=================================
2992
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002993*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002994
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002995Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002996--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002997
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002998- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2999
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003000- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3001 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003002 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003003 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003004 a different meaning than before.
3005
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003006- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003007 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003008 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003009
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003010- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003011 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003012 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003013
3014- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3015 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3016 and deallocation.
3017
3018- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3019 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3020
3021- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3022 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3023 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3024 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3025 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3026
3027- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3028 now detected by the garbage collector.
3029
3030- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3031 [SF bug 519621]
3032
3033- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3034 identifier.
3035
3036- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3037 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3038 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3039 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3040 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3041 [SF bug 563060]
3042
3043- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3044 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3045 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3046 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3047 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3048
3049- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3050 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3051 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3052
3053- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3054
3055- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3056 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3057 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3058 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3059 state of the slots would be lost.)
3060
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003061Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003062-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003063
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003064- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003065 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3066 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3067 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3068 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003069 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3070 Jython 2.1.
3071
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003072- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003073 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003074 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3075 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3076 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3077 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3078 these, see PEP 302.
3079
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003080- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3081 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3082 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3083
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003084- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3085 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3086 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3087
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003088- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3089 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3090 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3091
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003092- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3093 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3094 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3095 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3096 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3097 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3098 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3099 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3100 releases or implementations.
3101
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003102- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003103 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3104 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003105
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003106- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3107 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3108
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003109- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3110 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3111 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3112
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003113- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3114 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3115
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003116- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3117 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003118 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3119 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003120
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003121- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3122 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3123 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3124 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3125 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3126
3127 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3128 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3129 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3130 pattern.
3131
3132 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3133 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3134 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3135 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3136
3137 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3138 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3139 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3140 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3141 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3142 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3143
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003144- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3145 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3146 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3147 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3148 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3149 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3150 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3151 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003152
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003153- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3154 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3155 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3156 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3157 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003158 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3159 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3160 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3161 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3162 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3163 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3164 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003165
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003166- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3167 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3168
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003169- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3170 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3171 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3172 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3173 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3174 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3175 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3176 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3177 to Zack Weinberg!
3178
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003179- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3180 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3181 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3182 type. This has been fixed now.
3183
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003184- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3185 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3186 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3187
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003188- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3189 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3190 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3191 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3192 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3193 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3194 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3195 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003196 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003197
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003198- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3199 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3200 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003201
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003202- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3203 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3204 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3205 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3206 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3207 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3208 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3209 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003210 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003211 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3212 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3213
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003214- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3215 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3216 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3217 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3218 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3219 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3220 this.)
3221
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003222- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3223 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003224 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003225 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003226 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3227 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003228 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3229 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003230
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003231- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3232 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3233 currently running.
3234
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003235- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3236 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3237 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3238 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3239
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003240- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3241 as directory names.
3242
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003243- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3244 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3245
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003246- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3247 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3248
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003249- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003250 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3251 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003252
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003253- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3254 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3255 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3256 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3257 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3258
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003259- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3260 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3261 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3262 removed.
3263
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003264- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3265 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3266 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3267
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003268- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3269 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3270 to __debug__.
3271
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003272- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3273 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3274 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3275
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003276- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3277 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3278 deprecated now.
3279
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003280- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3281 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3282 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003283
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003284- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3285 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3286 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3287 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3288 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003289
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003290- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3291 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3292
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003293- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3294 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3295 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003296 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003297 is backward compatible.
3298
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003299- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3300 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3301 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3302 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3303 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3304
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003305- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3306 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3307 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3308 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3309 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3310 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003311
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003312- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3313 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3314
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003315- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3316 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3317
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003318- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3319 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3320 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3321 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3322 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3323
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003324- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3325 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3326 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3327
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003328- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003329 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3330
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003331- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3332 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3333 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003334
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003335- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3336 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3337
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003338- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3339 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3340 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3341
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003342- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3343
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003344Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003345-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003346
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003347- Added three operators to the operator module:
3348 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3349 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3350 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3351
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003352- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3353
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003354- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3355 archives.
3356
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003357- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3358 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3359 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3360
3361 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3362
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003363- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3364 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3365 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003366 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003367
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003368- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3369 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3370 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3371 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003372 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3373 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3374 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3375 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003376
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003377- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3378 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003379
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003380- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3381
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003382- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3383 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3384
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003385- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3386 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3387 supported.
3388
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003389- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3390
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003391- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3392 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003393
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003394- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3395 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3396
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003397- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3398
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003399- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3400 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3401
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003402- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3403 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3404 functions but callable type objects.
3405
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003406- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003407 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003408 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003409
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003410- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3411 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003412
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003413- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3414 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003415
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003416- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3417 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3418 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3419 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3420
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003421- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3422 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003423
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003424- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3425 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3426 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3427 and __imul__.
3428
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003429- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003430 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3431 is called.
3432
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003433- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3434 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3435 interpreter was compiled.
3436
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003437- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3438 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3439 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003440 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003441 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3442 1, not 2.
3443
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003444- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3445 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3446 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3447 limit.
3448
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003449- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3450 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3451 bug #623464.
3452
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003453- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3454 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3455 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3456 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3457
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003458Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003459-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003460
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003461- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3462
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003463- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3464 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3465 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3466 with Python 2.3a2.
3467
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003468- os.path exposes getctime.
3469
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003470- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003471 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003472 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003473 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003474 unit tests of floating point results.
3475
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003476- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3477 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3478 has been increased.
3479
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003480- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3481 executed.
3482
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003483- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3484 postinstallation script.
3485
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003486- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3487 test the current module.
3488
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003489- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003490 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3491 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3492 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3493 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3494
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003495- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003496 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003497 Ward's Optik package.
3498
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003499- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3500 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3501 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3502 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3503
3504- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3505 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003506 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003507
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003508- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3509 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3510 shelf are binary pickles.
3511
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003512- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3513 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3514
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003515- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3516 modules are iterators now.
3517
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003518- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3519 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3520 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3521 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3522 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3523 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003524
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003525- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3526 with their entity value.
3527
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003528- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3529
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003530- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3531 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003532
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003533- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3534 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003535 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003536
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003537- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3538 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3539 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3540 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3541 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3542 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3543 main():
3544
3545 import locale
3546 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3547
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003548- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3549 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3550
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003551- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3552 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3553 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3554 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3555 to the new standard.
3556
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003557- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3558 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3559 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3560 an extension to the database.
3561
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003562- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3563 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3564 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3565 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003566 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003567
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003568- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003569 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003570
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003571- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3572 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3573 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3574 bounded integers.
3575
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003576- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3577 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3578 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3579 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3580 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3581 in existence.
3582
3583 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3584 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3585 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3586 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3587 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3588 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3589
3590 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3591 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3592 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3593 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3594
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003595- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3596 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3597 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3598
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003599- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3600
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003601- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3602 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3603 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3604 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3605
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003606- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3607 argument.
3608
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003609- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3610 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3611 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3612 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3613 [SF patch 560794].
3614
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003615- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3616 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3617 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003618 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3619 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3620 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003621
3622- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3623 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003624
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003625- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3626 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3627 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3628 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003629
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003630- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3631 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3632 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3633 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3634 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3635
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003636- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003637
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003638- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3639
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003640- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3641 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3642 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3643 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3644 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3645 identical to None.
3646
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003647- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3648 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3649 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3650 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3651 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3652 results now.
3653
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003654- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3655 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3656
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003657- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3658 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3659 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3660 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3661 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3662 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3663 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3664 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3665
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003666- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3667
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003668- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3669 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3670
3671- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3672 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3673 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3674 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3675 and other systems.
3676
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003677- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3678 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3679 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3680 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 +00003681 work well with these.
3682
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003683- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3684
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003685- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003686 connections.
3687
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003688- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3689 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3690 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3691
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003692- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3693 sets
3694
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003695- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3696 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3697 name.
3698
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003699- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3700 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3701 passed in.
3702
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003703- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003704 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003705 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3706 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003707
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003708- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3709
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003710- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3711
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003712- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3713 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3714 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3715
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003716- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3717 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3718 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3719 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003720 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003721
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003722- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003723 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003724 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003725
3726- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3727 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3728 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3729
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003730- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003731 the value of its expression argument.
3732
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003733- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3734 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3735 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3736
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003737- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3738 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3739 skipstone browser was included.
3740
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003741- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3742 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3743
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003744Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003745-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003746
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003747- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3748 names in addition to accepting file names.
3749
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003750- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3751 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3752 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3753 still used and useful.)
3754
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003755- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3756 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3757 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3758 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003759
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003760- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3761 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3762 the generated binary.
3763
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003764Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003765-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003766
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003767- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3768
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003769- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3770 except in the hands of experts.
3771
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003772- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003773 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3774 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3775 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003776
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003777- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3778 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3779 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3780 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3781 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3782 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3783 builds.
3784
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003785- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3786 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3787 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3788 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3789 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3790 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3791 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3792 new type.
3793
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003794- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003795
3796 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3797 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3798 positive infinities.
3799
3800 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3801 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3802 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3803 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3804 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3805 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3806 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3807
3808 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3809
3810 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3811
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003812- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3813 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3814 size of the executable.
3815
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003816- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3817 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3818 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3819 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003820
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003821- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3822
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003823- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3824 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3825 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003826
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003827- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3828 well as Unix.
3829
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003830- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3831 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3832 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3833 modules in the README file for details.
3834
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003835C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003836-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003837
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003838- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3839 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003840 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003841 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003842 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003843
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003844- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3845 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3846 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3847 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3848 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3849 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003850 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003851 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3852 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3853 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3854 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3855 aligned.)
3856
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003857- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3858 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3859 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3860
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003861- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3862 level.
3863
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003864- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3865 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3866 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3867 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3868 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3869
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003870- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3871 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3872 code.
3873
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003874- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3875 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3876 adjusting for negative indices.
3877
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003878- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3879 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3880 object.
3881
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003882- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3883 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3884 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3885
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003886- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3887 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003888
3889- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3890
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003891- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3892 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3893 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3894 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3895
3896- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3897
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003898- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003899
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003900- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003901 without going through the buffer API.
3902
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003903- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003904
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003905- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3906 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3907 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3908 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3909
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003910- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3911 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3912
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003913- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003914 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3915
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003916New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003917-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003918
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003919- OpenVMS is now supported.
3920
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003921- AtheOS is now supported.
3922
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003923- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3924
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003925- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3926
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003927Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003928-----
3929
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003930- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3931 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3932 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003933
3934Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003935-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003936
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003937- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3938 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3939 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3940 bugs.
3941 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003942 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003943 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3944 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003945 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003946
3947- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003948 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003949
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003950- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3951 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3952
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003953- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3954 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003955 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003956 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3957
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003958- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3959 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3960 use files" uninstall option).
3961
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003962- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3963
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003964- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3965 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3966
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003967- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3968 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3969 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3970
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003971- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3972 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3973 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3974 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3975 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003976 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3977 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3978 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003979
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003980- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003981 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003982 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3983 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3984 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3985 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3986 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3987 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3988 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3989 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3990 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3991 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3992 work around.
3993
3994- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3995 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3996 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3997 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3998 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3999 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4000 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4001 specified with O_CREAT too).
4002
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004003Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004004----
4005
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004006- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004007
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004008- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4009 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4010 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4011
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004012- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4013 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4014 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4015
4016- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4017 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4018 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4019 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4020 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4021 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4022 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4023 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004024
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004025- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4026 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4027 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004028
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004029- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4030 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4031 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4032 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4033 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004034
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004035- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4036 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4037 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004038
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004039- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4040 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004041
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004042- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4043 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4044 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4045 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4046 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004047
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004048- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4049 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4050 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4051
4052- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4053 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4054 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004055
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004056- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4057 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4058 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4059 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004060 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004061
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004062- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4063 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004064
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004065- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4066 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004067
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004068- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004069 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004070 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4071 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004072
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004073
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004074What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004075===============================
4076
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004077*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4078
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004079Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004080--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004081
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004082- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4083 with a custom metaclass.
4084
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004085Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004086-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004087
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004088- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4089 are proxies.
4090
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004091Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004092-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004093
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004094- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4095 very short strings.
4096
4097- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4098 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4099 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4100 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4101 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4102
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004103Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004104-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004105
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004106- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4107 close or delete time).
4108
4109- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4110 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4111
4112- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4113
4114- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004115 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004116
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004117Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004118-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004119
4120Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004121-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004122
4123C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004124-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004125
4126New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004127-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004128
4129Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004130-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004131
4132Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004133-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004134
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004135- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4136
4137- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4138 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4139
4140- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4141 deleted at process exit time.
4142
4143- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4144 in backslash.
4145
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004146Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004147----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004148
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004149- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4150 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4151 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4152
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004153
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004154What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004155===========================
4156
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004157*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4158
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004159Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004160--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004161
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004162- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4163 been extensively updated. See
4164
4165 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4166
4167 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4168
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004169- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4170 deleted!
4171
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004172- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4173 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4174 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4175 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4176 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4177
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004178- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4179
4180 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4181 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4182
4183 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4184 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4185 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4186 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4187 supported anyway.
4188
4189 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4190 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4191
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004192- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4193 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4194 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4195 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4196 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004197
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004198- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4199 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4200 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4201
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004202Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004203-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004204
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004205- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4206 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4207 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4208 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4209 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4210 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004211 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4212 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4213 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4214 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004215
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004216- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4217 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4218 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4219
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004220Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004221-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004222
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004223- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4224
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004225Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004226-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004227
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004228- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4229 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4230 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4231 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4232 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4233 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4234
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004235- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4236
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004237- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4238
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004239- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4240
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004241- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4242 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4243 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4244
4245- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4246
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004247Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004248-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004249
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004250- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4251 off a search on Google.
4252
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004253Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004254-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004255
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004256- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4257 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4258 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4259 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4260 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4261 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4262 other platforms should do likewise.
4263
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004264- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4265 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4266 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4267
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004268C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004269-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004270
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004271- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4272 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4273 producing key-value pairs.
4274
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004275- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004276 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004277 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4278 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4279 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4280 previously went unchallenged.
4281
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004282New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004283-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004284
4285Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004286-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004287
4288Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004289-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004290
4291Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004292----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004293
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004294- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4295 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004296
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004297- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4298 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4299 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4300 home.
4301
4302
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004303What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004304===========================
4305
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004306*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4307
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004308Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004309--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004310
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004311- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4312 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004313
4314 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004315 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004316
4317 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4318 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004319 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004320 This needs to be documented.
4321
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004322- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4323 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4324
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004325- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4326 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4327 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4328
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004329- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4330 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4331
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004332- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4333 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4334 class forbids it).
4335
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004336- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4337 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4338 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4339
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004340- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4341
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004342Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004343-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004344
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004345- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4346 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004347 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004348
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004349- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4350 (like 1 + '').
4351
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004352Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004353-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004354
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004355- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4356 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4357 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4358 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004359 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004360 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4361
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004362- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4363 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4364 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4365 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4366
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004367- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4368 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004369 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4370 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4371 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004372
4373- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4374 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004375
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004376- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4377 bytes on its input.
4378
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004379Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004380-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004381
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004382- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004383 convenience function.
4384
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004385- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4386 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4387 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004388 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4389 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4390 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4391 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4392 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4393 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004394
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004395- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4396 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4397 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4398 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4399
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004400- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4401 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4402 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4403
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004404- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4405 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4406 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4407 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4408
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004409- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4410 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004411 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004412 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4413 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4414 new -l and -e options.
4415
4416- statcache is now deprecated.
4417
4418- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4419 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004420 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004421 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4422 time properly taken into account.
4423
4424- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4425 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4426 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4427 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4428
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004429Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004430-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004431
4432Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004433-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004434
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004435- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4436 is built with libdb3 if available.
4437
4438- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4439
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004440C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004441-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004442
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004443- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4444 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4445 PySequence_Size().
4446
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004447- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4448
4449- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4450 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4451 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4452
4453- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4454 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4455
4456- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4457 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4458
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004459New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004460-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004461
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004462- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4463 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4464
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004465- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4466 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4467
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004468- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4469
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004470Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004471-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004472
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004473- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4474 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4475
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004476Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004477-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004478
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004479Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004480----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004481
4482- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4483 removed completely in the next release.
4484
4485- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4486 OSX.
4487
4488- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4489 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4490
4491- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4492
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004493
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004494What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004495===========================
4496
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004497*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4498
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004499Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004500--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004501
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004502- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004503 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004504 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004505 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4506 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004507 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4508 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004509 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4510 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004511
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004512- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4513 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4514
4515- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4516 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4517
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004518Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004519-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004520
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004521- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4522 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4523 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4524 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4525 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4526 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4527 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4528 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4529
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004530- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4531 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4532 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4533 example).
4534
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004535- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004536 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004537 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004538 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004539
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004540- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4541 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4542 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004543 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004544
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004545- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4546 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4547 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4548 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4549 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4550 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4551
4552 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4553
4554 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4555
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004556Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004557-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004558
4559- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4560
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004561- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4562
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004563- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4564 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004565
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004566- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4567 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4568 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4569 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4570 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4571 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004572 attributes.
4573
4574- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4575 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4576 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004577
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004578- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4579 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4580 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004581
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004582- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4583 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4584 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004585 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4586 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4587
4588- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4589 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004590
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004591Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004592-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004593
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004594- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4595 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4596
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004597- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4598 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4599 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4600 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4601
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004602- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4603 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4604 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4605 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4606
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004607 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4608 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4609 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4610 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4611 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4612 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4613 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4614 without losing information).
4615
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004616- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004617 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4618 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4619 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4620 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4621 module).
4622
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004623 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004624 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4625 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4626 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4627 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004628
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004629- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004630 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4631 encoding.
4632
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004633- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4634 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4635
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004636- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004637 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4638
4639- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4640 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4641 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4642 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4643
4644- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4645
4646- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4647 ON, and OFF.
4648
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004649- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4650 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4651
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004652Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004653-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004654
4655- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4656 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4657 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004658
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004659- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4660 been added: -X and -E.
4661
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004662Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004663-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004664
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004665- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4666 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4667
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004668C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004669-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004670
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004671- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4672 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4673 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4674 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4675 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4676
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004677- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4678 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4679 as long) arguments.
4680
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004681- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4682 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4683 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4684 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4685 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4686 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4687
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004688- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4689 input.
4690
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004691New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004692-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004693
4694Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004695-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004696
4697Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004698-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004699
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004700- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4701 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4702 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4703
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004704- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4705 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4706 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004707 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004708
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004709 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4710 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4711 import signal
4712 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004713
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004714 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004715 while 1:
4716 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004717 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004718 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4719 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4720 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4721 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004722
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004723
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004724What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4725===========================
4726
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004727*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4728
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004729Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004730--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004731
4732- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4733 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4734 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4735
4736- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4737 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4738 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4739 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4740 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4741 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4742 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004743
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004744- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004745 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004746 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4747 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4748 associate a docstring with a property.
4749
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004750- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4751 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4752 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4753 other built-in object types.
4754
4755- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4756 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4757 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4758 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4759 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4760
4761- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4762 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4763
4764- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4765 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004766 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004767 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4768 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4769 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4770 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4771 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4772
4773- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4774 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4775 class.
4776
4777- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4778 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4779 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4780 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4781
4782- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4783 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4784 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4785 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4786
4787- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4788 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4789
4790- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4791 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4792 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4793 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4794 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004795 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004796 with the same value as s.
4797
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004798- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4799
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004800Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004801----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004802
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004803- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4804
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004805- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4806 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4807 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4808 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4809 objects.
4810
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004811- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4812 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004813 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4814 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4815
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004816- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4817 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4818 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4819
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004820Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004821-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004822
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004823- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4824 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4825 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4826 by the instances.
4827
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004828- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4829 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4830 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4831
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004832- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4833 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4834 before the entire comparison is complete.
4835
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004836- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4837 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4838 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4839
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004840- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4841 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4842 getwriter().
4843
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004844- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4845 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4846
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004847- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004848 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4849 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4850
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004851- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4852 iterable object.
4853
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004854- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4855 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004856
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004857- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4858 authentication.
4859
4860- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4861 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004862
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004863- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004864 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4865 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4866 a sample driver.)
4867
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004868Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004869-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004870
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004871- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4872 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4873 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4874 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4875 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4876 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4877 kernel has large file support.
4878
4879- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4880 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4881 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4882 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4883 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4884
4885- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4886 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4887 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4888
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004889C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004890-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004891
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004892- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4893 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4894
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004895New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004896-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004897
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004898- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4899 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4900
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004901Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004902-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004903
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004904- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4905 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4906 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4907 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4908 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4909
4910- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4911 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4912 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4913 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4914
4915- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4916 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4917
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004918Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004919-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004920
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004921- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004922 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4923 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004924
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004925
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004926What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4927===========================
4928
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004929*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4930
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004931Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004932----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004933
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004934- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4935 big to represent as a C double.
4936
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004937- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4938 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4939 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4940 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4941 restriction).
4942
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004943- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4944 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4945 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4946 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4947 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4948
4949 >>> dir([])
4950 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4951 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4952 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4953 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4954 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4955 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4956 'reverse', 'sort']
4957
4958 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4959
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004960- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004961 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4962 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4963 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4964 OverflowError exception.
4965
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004966- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004967 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004968 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4969 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4970 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4971 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4972 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004973 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004974 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4975 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4976
4977 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4978 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4979 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4980 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004981
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004982- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004983 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4984 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4985 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4986 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4987 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4988 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4989 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4990 once it is created.
4991
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004992- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4993 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4994 (key, value) pairs.
4995
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004996- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004997 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4998 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4999
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005000- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5001 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5002 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5003 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5004 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005005
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005006- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005007 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5008 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5009
5010 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5011
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005012- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005013 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5014
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005015Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005016-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005017
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005018- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005019 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5020 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005021
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005022- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5023 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5024 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5025 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5026 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5027 in this area anymore).
5028
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005029- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5030 threading.Timer.
5031
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005032- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5033 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5034
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005035- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005036 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5037
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005038- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005039 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5040 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5041 converted to Python longs.
5042
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005043- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005044 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5045
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005046- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5047 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5048 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5049
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005050Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005051-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005052
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005053- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5054 division operators as per PEP 238.
5055
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005056Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005057-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005058
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005059- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5060 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5061 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5062 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5063
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005064C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005065-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005066
5067- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005068
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005069- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5070 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005071 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005072
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005073 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5074 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005075 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005076 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005077
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005078- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005079 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5080 module:
5081
5082 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005083
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005084 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5085 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005086
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005087 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5088 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005089
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005090 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5091
5092 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5093
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005094- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005095 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5096 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5097 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005098
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005099New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005100-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005101
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005102- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5103 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5104 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5105 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5106 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005107
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005108Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005109-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005110
5111Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005112-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005113
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005114- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5115 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5116 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5117 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005118 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5119 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5120 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5121 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5122 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005123
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005124- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005125 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5126
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005127
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005128What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5129===========================
5130
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005131*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5132
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005133Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005134-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005135
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005136- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5137 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5138
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005139- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5140 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5141 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005142
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005143- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5144 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5145 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5146 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005147
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005148- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5149
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005150- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005151
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005152Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005153-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005154
5155- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005156 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005157 the module docstring for details.
5158
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005159Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005160-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005161
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005162- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005163 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5164 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5165 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005166
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005167- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5168 Nick Mathewson.
5169
5170Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005171----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005172
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005173- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5174 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5175 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5176 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5177 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5178 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5179 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5180 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5181
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005182- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5183 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5184 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5185 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5186
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005187- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5188 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5189 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5190 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5191 come a long way).
5192
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005193- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5194 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5195 write filters for these warnings).
5196
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005197- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5198 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5199 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5200 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5201 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5202
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005203- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5204 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5205 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5206 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5207 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5208 older distribution.
5209
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005210Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005211-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005212
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005213- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5214 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005215 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005216
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005217- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5218 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5219 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5220
5221- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5222
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005223- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5224
5225- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5226
5227- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5228
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005229- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005230
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005231- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5232
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005233New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005234-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005235
5236C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005237-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005238
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005239- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5240 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5241 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5242 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5243 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5244 against buffer overruns.
5245
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005246- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005247 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5248 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005249 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5250 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5251 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5252
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005253- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5254 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5255 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5256 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5257 deprecated.
5258
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005259Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005260-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005261
5262- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5263 relevant is found.
5264
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005265
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005266What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005267===========================
5268
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005269*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5270
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005271Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005272----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005273
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005274- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5275 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5276 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5277 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5278 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5279 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5280 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5281 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005282 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005283 repaired.
5284
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005285- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005286 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005287 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5288 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5289 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5290 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5291 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5292 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5293 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5294 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5295
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005296- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5297 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5298 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5299 leading BMO character).
5300
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005301- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5302 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5303 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5304
5305 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5306 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5307 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005308
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005309 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5310 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5311 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5312 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5313 for various simple to use conversions.
5314
5315 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5316 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5317
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005318 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5319 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5320 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5321 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5322 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5323 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5324 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5325 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5326 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5327 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5328 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5329 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5330 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5331 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5332 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005333
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005334- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5335 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5336 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005337 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005338 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005339
5340 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005341 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5342 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5343 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5344 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5345 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005346 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5347 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005348
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005349 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5350 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5351 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005352 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005353
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005354- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5355 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5356 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5357 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5358 floating arithmetic,
5359
5360 x = 9007199254740992.0
5361 print long(x)
5362
5363 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5364 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5365 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5366 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5367 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5368 functions are of good quality).
5369
5370 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5371 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5372 algorithms to break.
5373
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005374- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5375 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5376 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5377 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5378 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5379 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5380 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5381 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5382 order.
5383
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005384- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5385 operation along the most common code paths.
5386
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005387- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5388 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5389
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005390- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5391 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5392 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5393 {}.update(UserDict())
5394
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005395- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5396 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5397 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5398 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5399 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5400 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5401 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5402 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5403
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005404- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005405 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005406
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005407 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005408 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5409 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005410 join() method of strings
5411 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005412 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5413 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005414 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005415 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005416
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005417- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5418 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5419
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005420- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5421 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5422
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005423- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5424 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5425 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5426 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5427
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005428- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5429 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005430 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005431 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5432 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005433
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005434- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5435
5436
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005437Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005438-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005439
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005440- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005441 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005442 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5443 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5444
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005445- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5446 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5447
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005448- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5449 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5450 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5451 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5452
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005453- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5454 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5455 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5456
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005457- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5458
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005459- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5460
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005461- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5462 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5463 that are still imported into string.py).
5464
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005465- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5466
5467- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5468 Now it does.
5469
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005470- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5471
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005472- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5473 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5474 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5475 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5476 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005477 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5478 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005479
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005480- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5481 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5482 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5483 'help(object)'.
5484
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005485Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005486-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005487
5488- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005489 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005490 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5491 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5492
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005493- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005494 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5495 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005496
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005497C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005498-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005499
5500- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5501 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005502
5503----
5504
5505**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**