blob: e88311f8ed82d3cddc2e4164d4f09c285ea99113 [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
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000015- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
16 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
17 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
18 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
19 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
20
21- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
22
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000023- Speed up some Unicode operations.
24
25- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
26
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000027- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000028 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
29
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000030- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
31
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000032- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
33 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
34
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000035- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
36
37- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
38
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000039- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
40 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
41 was empty.
42
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000043- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
44 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
45
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000046- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000047 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000048
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000049- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
50 codes.
51
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000052- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
53 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
54 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
55
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000056- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
57 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
58
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000059- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000060 (fixes bug #1119418).
61
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000062- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
63
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000064- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
65 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
66
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000067- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
68 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
69 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
70
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000071- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
72
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000073- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
74 reference counts in some error exit cases.
75
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000076- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
77 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
78 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
79 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
80 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
81 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
82 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
83 realloc.
84
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000085- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
86 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
87
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000088- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
89 like their int counterparts.
90
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000091- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
92 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
93 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
94 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
95 for a longer write-up of the problem).
96
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000097- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
98 serializing floats.
99
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000100- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
101 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
102 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
103
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000104- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
105 278.
106
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000107- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
108 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
109 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
110 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000111 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000112 PyNumber_*().
113 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
114
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000115- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
116 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
117 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
118 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
119
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000120- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
121 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
122 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
123 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
124 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
125
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000126- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
127 disabled caused a crash.
128
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000129- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
130 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
131
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000132- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000133 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
134
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000135- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
136
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000137- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000138 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
139 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
140 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000141
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000142- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
143
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000144- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
145 returning None.
146
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000147- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000148 ('\') with a specific error message.
149
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000150- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
151
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000152- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
153 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
154
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000155- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000156 an ferror() call.
157
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000158- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
159 list.sort().
160
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000161- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
162 (2+3) --> (5).
163
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000164- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
165
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000166- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
167 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000168
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000169- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
170 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
171 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
172
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000173- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
174 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
175 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
176
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000177Extension Modules
178-----------------
179
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000180- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
181 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
182
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000183- Get bsddb module to build with BSD DB version 3.2
184
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000185- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
186 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
187
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000188- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
189
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000190- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
191 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
192
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000193- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
194 returns in cStringIO.c.
195
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000196- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
197 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
198
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000199- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
200
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000201- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
202
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000203- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
204 the file system encoding.
205
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000206- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
207 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000208
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000209- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
210
211- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000212 line without newlines.
213
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000214- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
215 on Windows.
216
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000217- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000218 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
219
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000220- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
221 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
222 for large or negative values.
223
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000224- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000225 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000226
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000227- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
228
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000229- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
230 if available on the platform.
231
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000232- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
233 available on the platform.
234
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000235- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
236 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
237
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000238- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
239
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000240- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
241 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
242 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
243
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000244- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
245
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000246- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
247 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
248
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000249- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000250 file size.
251
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000252- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
253
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000254- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
255 {remove_history,replace_history}
256
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000257- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
258 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000259
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000260- stat_float_times is now True.
261
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000262- array.array objects are now picklable.
263
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000264- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
265 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
266
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000267- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
268 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
269 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
270
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000271- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
272 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000273
274Library
275-------
276
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000277- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
278
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000279- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000280 "parent" argument.
281
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000282- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
283 for padding.
284
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000285- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
286 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
287
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000288- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
289 to get the correct encoding.
290
291- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
292 languages.
293
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000294- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
295
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000296- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
297
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000298- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
299
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000300- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
301 functionality.
302
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000303- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
304
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000305- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
306 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
307
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000308- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
309 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
310 match the Content-Length header.
311
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000312- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
313
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000314- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
315 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000316 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000317
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000318- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
319
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000320- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
321
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000322- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
323 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
324
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000325- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
326 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
327 Tkdnd.
328
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000329- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
330 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
331
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000332- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
333 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
334
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000335- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000336 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
337
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000338- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
339 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
340
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000341- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
342 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
343
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000344- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000345 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000346
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000347- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
348
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000349- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
350 error messages.
351
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000352- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
353
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000354- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
355 Bug #1224621.
356
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000357- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
358 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
359 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
360 terminates by raising StopIteration.
361
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000362- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
363
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000364- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
365 component of the path.
366
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000367- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
368 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
369 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
370 class at all.
371
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000372- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
373 files to PyPI.
374
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000375- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
376 them to PyPI.
377
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000378- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
379 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
380 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
381 work as expected.
382
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000383- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
384 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
385
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000386- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000387 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
388
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000389- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
390
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000391- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
392 to build.
393
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000394- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
395 symbolic links on Windows.
396
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000397- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000398 profile.py if available.
399
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000400- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
401
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000402- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
403 in LWPCookieJar.
404
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000405- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
406
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000407- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
408
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000409- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
410
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000411- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
412
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000413- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
414
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000415- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
416
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000417- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
418
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000419- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
420
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000421- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
422 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
423 be exploited in various ways.
424
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000425- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
426
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000427- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
428
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000429- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
430
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000431- Enhancements to the csv module:
432
433 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000434 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000435 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000436 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
437 reporting.
438 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
439 dictates.
440 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000441 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000442 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000443 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
444 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000445 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
446 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000447 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000448 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
449 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
450 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
451 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
452 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
453 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
454 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
455 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
456 without first creating a dialect class.
457 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
458 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
459 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000460 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000461 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
462 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000463 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
464 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
465 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
466 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000467 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
468 This has been fixed.
469
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000470- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
471 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
472 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
473 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
474
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000475- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
476
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000477- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
478 (Bug #951915).
479
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000480- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
481 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
482 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000483 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000484
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000485- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
486
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000487- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
488 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
489
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000490- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
491
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000492- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
493
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000494- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
495
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000496- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
497
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000498- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
499
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000500- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
501 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
502 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
503
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000504- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000505 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000506
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000507- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
508 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
509 tokenizer with very long source lines.
510
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000511- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
512 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
513
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000514- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
515 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000516
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000517- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
518 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
519
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000520- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
521 correctly.
522
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000523- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
524 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
525 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
526 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
527 between two lines.
528
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000529- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
530 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
531 handlers.
532
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000533- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000534 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
535 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000536
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000537- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
538 considering it exactly like a '*'.
539
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000540- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
541 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000542
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000543Build
544-----
545
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000546- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
547 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
548
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000549- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
550 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
551
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000552- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
553 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
554 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000555 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000556
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000557- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
558 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
559 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
560
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000561- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
562
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000563- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
564 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
565
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000566- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
567 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
568 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
569 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
570 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
571 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
572 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
573 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
574
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000575- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
576 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
577 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
578 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
579
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000580
581C API
582-----
583
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000584- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
585
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000586- Removed PyRange_New().
587
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000588- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
589 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
590 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
591 mappings.
592
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000593
594Tests
595-----
596
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000597- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000598
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000599
600Documentation
601-------------
602
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000603- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
604
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000605- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
606
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000607- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
608
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000609- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
610
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000611- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
612
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000613- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
614
615- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
616
617- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
618
619- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
620
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000621- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
622 Closes bug #1166582.
623
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000624- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
625 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
626 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
627
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000628Mac
629---
630
631
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000632New platforms
633-------------
634
635- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
636
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000637
638Tools/Demos
639-----------
640
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000641- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
642 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
643 source files that need an encoding declaration.
644 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
645
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000646- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
647
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000648- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000649
650
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000651What's New in Python 2.4 final?
652===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000653
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000654*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000655
656Core and builtins
657-----------------
658
659- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
660 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
661 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
662
663
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000664What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
665==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000666
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000667*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000668
669Core and builtins
670-----------------
671
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000672- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
673 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
674 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
675
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000676
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000677Library
678-------
679
680- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
681 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
682 raised is re-raised.
683
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000684- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
685 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
686
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000687- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
688 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
689 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
690 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
691 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
692 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
693 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
694 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
695 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
696 by the slice are recomputed now.
697
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000698- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000699
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000700Build
701-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000702
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000703- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
704 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
705 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000706
707C API
708-----
709
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000710- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
711
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000712
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000713What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
714================================
715
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000716*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000717
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000718License
719-------
720
721The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
722is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
723changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
724Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
725intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
726durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
727the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
728License::
729
730 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
731
732says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
733to Python 2.1.1.
734
735The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
736License Version 2.
737
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000738Core and builtins
739-----------------
740
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000741- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
742 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
743 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
744 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
745 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
746 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
747 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
748 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
749 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
750 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
751
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000752- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000753
754Extension Modules
755-----------------
756
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000757- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
758 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
759 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
760 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000761
762Library
763-------
764
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000765- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
766 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
767 returned.
768
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000769- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
770
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000771- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
772 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
773
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000774- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
775
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000776- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
777 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000778
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000779- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
780
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000781- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
782
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000783- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000784 the source code is updated and reloaded.
785
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000786Build
787-----
788
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000789- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000790
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000791What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
792================================
793
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000794*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000795
796Core and builtins
797-----------------
798
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000799- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000800 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
801
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000802- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
803 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
804 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
805 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
806
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000807- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
808 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
809
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000810- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
811 constant.
812
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000813- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
814 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
815 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
816 large), and to anomalies such as
817 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
818 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
819 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
820 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000821
822Extension modules
823-----------------
824
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000825- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
826 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000827 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
828 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
829 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000830
831Library
832-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000833
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000834- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000835 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000836 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
837 --swig-cpp.
838
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000839- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
840 it is set.
841
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000842- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000843
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000844- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
845 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
846 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
847 Closes bug #1039270.
848
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000849- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000850
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000851 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000852 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
853 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
854 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
855 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
856 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
857 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
858 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
859 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
860 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
861 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
862 + Updates to documentation.
863
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000864- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
865 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
866 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
867 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
868
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000869- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000870
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000871- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
872 applications should use the getmember function.
873
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000874- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
875
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000876- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
877 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
878 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
879 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
880 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
881 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
882 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
883 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
884 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
885
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000886- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
887 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000888 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000889
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000890- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
891 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
892 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
893 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
894 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
895 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
896 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
897 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000898
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000899- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
900 the new public features (of which there are many).
901
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000902- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000903 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
904 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
905 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
906 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000907 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000908
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000909- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
910
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000911- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
912 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
913 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
914 options.
915
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000916- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
917 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
918 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
919 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
920 conditions under which non-string values work.
921
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000922Build
923-----
924
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000925- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
926 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
927 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
928
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000929- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
930 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
931 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
932 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
933 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000934
935C API
936-----
937
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000938- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
939 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
940
941- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
942
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000943- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
944 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
945 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
946 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
947 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
948 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
949 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
950 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
951 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
952
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000953- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
954
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000955- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
956 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
957 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000958
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000959Tests
960-----
961
962- test__locale ported to unittest
963
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000964Mac
965---
966
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000967- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
968 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
969 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000970
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000971Tools/Demos
972-----------
973
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000974- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
975 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
976 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
977 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
978 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000979
980
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000981What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
982=================================
983
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000984*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000985
986Core and builtins
987-----------------
988
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000989- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000990 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
991
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000992- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
993 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
994 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
995 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
996 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
997 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
998 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
999 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001000 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1001 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1002 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1003 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1004 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001005
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001006- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1007 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1008 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1009 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1010 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1011
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001012- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1013
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001014- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1015 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1016
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001017- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1018 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1019 modified the list.
1020
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001021- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1022 functions is now writable.
1023
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001024- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1025 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1026 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1027 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1028
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001029- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1030 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1031 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1032 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1033 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001034
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001035- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1036 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1037
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001038Extension modules
1039-----------------
1040
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001041- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1042
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001043- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1044 data.
1045
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001046- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1047 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1048 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1049 supposed to have been truncated away.
1050
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001051- Added socket.socketpair().
1052
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001053- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1054 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1055
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001056- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001057 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1058
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001059Library
1060-------
1061
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001062- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001063 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001064
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001065- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1066 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1067
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001068- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1069 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1070
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001071- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1072
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001073- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1074 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001075
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001076- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1077 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1078
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001079- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1080
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001081- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1082
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001083- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1084
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001085- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1086 Percivall.
1087
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001088- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1089 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1090
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001091- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1092 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1093 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001094 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001095
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001096- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1097 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1098 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1099 and exponent.
1100
1101- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1102
1103- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001104 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001105 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1106
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001107- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1108 to the readline module.
1109
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001110- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001111 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1112 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001113
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001114- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1115 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1116 contains symlinks.
1117
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001118- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1119 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1120
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001121- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1122 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1123 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1124
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001125- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1126 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1127 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1128 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1129 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1130 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1131 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1132 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1133 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1134 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1135 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1136 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1137 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1138
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001139- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1140
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001141Tools/Demos
1142-----------
1143
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001144- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1145 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1146
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001147- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1148
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001149Build
1150-----
1151
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001152- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1153 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1154 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1155 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1156 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1157 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1158 plans to do so.
1159
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001160- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1161 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1162
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001163- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1164 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1165
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001166- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1167 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1168
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001169- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1170 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1171
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001172- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1173 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1174
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001175C API
1176-----
1177
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001178..
1179
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001180Documentation
1181-------------
1182
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001183- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1184 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1185
1186- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1187 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1188 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001189
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001190New platforms
1191-------------
1192
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001193- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1194
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001195Tests
1196-----
1197
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001198..
1199
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001200Windows
1201-------
1202
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001203- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1204 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1205 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1206 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1207 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1208 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1209 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1210 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1211 the problem.
1212
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001213Mac
1214---
1215
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001216..
1217
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001218
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001219What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1220=================================
1221
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001222*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001223
1224Core and builtins
1225-----------------
1226
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001227- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1228 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1229 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1230 sensitive code.
1231
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001232- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001233 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001234
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001235 @staticmethod
1236 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001237
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001238 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001239
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001240- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1241 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1242 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1243 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1244 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1245 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1246 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1247 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1248 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1249 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1250 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1251
1252 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1253 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1254 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1255 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1256 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1257 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1258 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1259
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001260- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1261 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1262
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001263- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001264 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001265
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001266- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001267 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001268 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1269
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001270- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001271 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1272 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1273
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001274- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1275 types that support garbage collection.
1276
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001277- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1278
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001279- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1280 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1281 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1282 Jython.
1283
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001284- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1285
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001286- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1287 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1288
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001289- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1290 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1291 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001292
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001293- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1294 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1295 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1296
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001297Extension modules
1298-----------------
1299
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001300- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1301
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001302Library
1303-------
1304
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001305- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1306 TIS-620
1307
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001308- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1309 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1310 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1311 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1312 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1313 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1314 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1315 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1316 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1317 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1318
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001319- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1320
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001321- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1322 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1323 same as when the argument is omitted).
1324 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1325
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001326- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1327
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001328- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1329 schemes are offered.
1330
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001331- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1332
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001333- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1334 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1335 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1336
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001337- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1338
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001339- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1340 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1341
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001342- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1343 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1344 when dummy_threading is being used.
1345
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001346- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1347 from a tarfile.
1348
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001349- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001350 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001351
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001352- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1353 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1354 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1355 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1356
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001357- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1358 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1359
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001360- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1361 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1362 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1363 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1364 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1365 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1366 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1367 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1368 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1369 by some other method in progress).
1370
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001371- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1372 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1373 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001374
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001375- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1376
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001377- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1378 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1379 AM Kuchling.
1380
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001381- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1382 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1383 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1384
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001385- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1386 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1387 instead of unsigned.
1388
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001389- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001390 no longer part of the public API.
1391
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001392- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1393 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1394 string methods of the same name).
1395
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001396- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001397 SF patch 945642.
1398
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001399- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1400
1401 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1402
1403 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1404 DocTestSuites.
1405
1406- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1407 that provide thread-local data.
1408
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001409- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1410 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1411
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001412- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1413
1414- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1415 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1416 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1417
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001418- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1419
1420 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1421 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1422 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001423
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001424 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1425 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1426 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1427 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1428
1429 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1430 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1431
1432 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1433 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1434 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1435 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1436
1437 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1438 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1439 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1440 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1441 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1442
1443 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1444 wrapping help output.
1445
1446 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1447 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1448 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001449
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001450C API
1451-----
1452
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001453- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1454 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1455 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1456 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1457 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1458 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1459 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1460 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1461 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1462 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1463 its visible semantics have not changed.
1464
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001465- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1466 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1467
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001468Documentation
1469-------------
1470
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001471- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001472
1473 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001474 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001475
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001476 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001477
1478 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1479
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001480- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001481
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001482Tests
1483-----
1484
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001485- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001486 platforms that use the Makefile.
1487
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001488- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1489 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1490 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1491
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001492
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001493What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1494=================================
1495
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001496*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001497
1498Core and builtins
1499-----------------
1500
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001501- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1502 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1503 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1504 objects now (one object instead of three).
1505
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001506- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1507 Windows DLLs.
1508
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001509- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1510 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001511
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001512- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1513 a new .pyc magic.
1514
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001515- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1516 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1517 be there.
1518
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001519- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1520 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1521 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1522
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001523- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1524 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1525 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1526
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001527- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1528
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001529- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1530 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1531 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001532
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001533- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1534 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1535
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001536- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1537
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001538- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001539 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001540
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001541- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1542
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001543- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1544
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001545- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1546 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1547
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001548- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1549 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1550 Fixes bug #858016 .
1551
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001552- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1553 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1554 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1555
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001556- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1557 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1558 improves their performance (about 35%).
1559
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001560- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1561 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1562 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1563
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001564- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1565 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1566 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1567 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1568
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001569- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1570 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001571 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001572 length is not known).
1573
1574- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1575 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001576 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1577 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001578 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1579
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001580- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1581 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1582
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001583- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1584 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1585 keyword arguments.
1586
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001587- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1588 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1589 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1590
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001591- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1592 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1593 cases.
1594
1595- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1596 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1597 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1598 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1599 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1600 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1601 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1602 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1603 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1604 a release build.
1605
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001606- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1607 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1608
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001609- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001610 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001611
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001612- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1613 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1614 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1615 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1616 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1617 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1618 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1619 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1620 destroyed.
1621
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001622- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1623 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1624 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1625 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1626 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1627 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1628 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1629 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1630
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001631- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1632 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1633 character other than a space.
1634
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001635- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1636 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1637 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1638 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1639 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1640 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1641 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1642 attributes with the same name.
1643
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001644- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1645 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1646 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1647 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1648 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1649 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1650 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1651 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1652 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1653 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1654 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1655 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1656 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1657 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001658
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001659- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1660 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1661 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1662 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1663 This has been repaired.
1664
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001665- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1666
1667- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1668
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001669- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1670 over a sequence.
1671
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001672- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001673 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001674
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001675- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1676
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001677- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1678 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1679 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1680 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1681 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1682 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1683 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1684 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1685
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001686- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1687 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1688 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1689
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001690- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1691 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1692 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1693 freelist.
1694
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001695- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1696 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1697
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001698- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1699 number.
1700
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001701- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1702 a TypeError exception.
1703
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001704- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1705 820195.
1706
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001707- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1708 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1709 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1710
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001711- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001712 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1713 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001714
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001715- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1716 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1717 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1718
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001719- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1720 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001721 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001722
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001723- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001724 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1725 the first call.
1726
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001727
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001728Extension modules
1729-----------------
1730
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001731- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1732 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1733
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001734- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1735 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1736 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1737 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1738 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1739 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1740 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001741
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001742- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1743
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001744- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1745
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001746- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1747 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1748
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001749- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1750 fewer false positives.
1751
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001752- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1753 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1754
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001755- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001756 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1757
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001758- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001759 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001760 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001761 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1762 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001763
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001764- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1765 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1766 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1767 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1768
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001769- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1770 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1771 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1772 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1773 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1774 #897625.
1775
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001776- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1777 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1778
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001779- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1780 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1781 and pops on either side of the deque.
1782
1783- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1784 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1785
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001786- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1787 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1788 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1789 other functions that expect a function argument.
1790
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001791- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1792
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001793- os.getsid was added.
1794
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001795- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1796 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1797 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1798
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001799- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1800
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001801- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1802
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001803- readline.clear_history was added.
1804
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001805- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1806
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001807- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1808
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001809- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1810
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001811- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1812
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001813- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1814
1815- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1816
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001817- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1818
1819- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1820
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001821- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1822 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1823 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1824
1825- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1826 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1827 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1828 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1829 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1830 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1831 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1832
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001833- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1834 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1835 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1836 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001837
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001838- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001839 iterators from a single iterable.
1840
1841- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1842 of raising a TypeError exception.
1843
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001844- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1845 as parameter.
1846
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001847Library
1848-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001849
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001850- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1851
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001852- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1853 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1854 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001855
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001856- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1857 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1858 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001859
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001860- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001861
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001862- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1863 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001864
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001865- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1866 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1867
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001868- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1869
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001870- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001871 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001872
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001873- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001874 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001875
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001876- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1877
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001878- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1879 on cygwin and mingw32.
1880
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001881- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1882
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001883- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1884 module.
1885
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001886- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1887 installation scheme for all platforms.
1888
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001889- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001890 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001891
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001892- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1893 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1894 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1895
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001896- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1897 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1898 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1899
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001900- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1901
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001902- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1903
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001904- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1905 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1906
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001907- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1908 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1909 type pattern with the same value exists.
1910
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001911- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1912 when run from the command prompt).
1913
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001914- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1915 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1916
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001917- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1918 default sort).
1919
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001920- Added global runctx function to profile module
1921
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001922- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1923
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001924- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1925
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001926- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1927
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001928- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001929 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1930 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1931 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1932 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1933 accordingly.
1934
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001935- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1936 decoding standards.
1937
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001938- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1939 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1940 called for all requests.
1941
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001942- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1943 they are passed to the compiler.
1944
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001945- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1946 indent, width and depth.
1947
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001948- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1949 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1950
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001951- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1952 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1953
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001954- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1955
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001956- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1957
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001958- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1959
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001960- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1961 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1962
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001963- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001964 for better performance.
1965
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001966- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001967
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001968- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1969 a string).
1970
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001971- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1972
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001973- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1974
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001975- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1976
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001977- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1978
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001979- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1980 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1981 list of fieldnames.
1982
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001983- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1984 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1985
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001986- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1987
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001988- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1989 empty lists.
1990
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001991- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1992 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1993 and shelves.
1994
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001995- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1996 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1997
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001998- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001999 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2000 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002001
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002002- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2003 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002004 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002005
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002006- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002007 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2008 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2009
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002010- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2011 and removed in Py2.4.
2012
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002013- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2014
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002015- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2016
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002017Tools/Demos
2018-----------
2019
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002020- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2021 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2022
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002023- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2024
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002025- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2026 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2027 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2028 destination in situations where both files are given.
2029
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002030- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2031 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2032 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2033 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2034
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002035- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2036
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002037- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2038 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2039 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2040 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2041 now.
2042
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002043- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2044 in effect
2045
2046- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2047 C-c C-h
2048
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002049- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2050 -d option was given.
2051
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002052Build
2053-----
2054
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002055- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2056 build under OS X.
2057
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002058- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2059 --enable-profiling.
2060
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002061- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2062 is configured --with-tsc.
2063
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002064- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2065 on AMD64.
2066
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002067- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2068 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2069
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002070- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2071 removed.
2072
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002073- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2074 supported (see PEP 11).
2075
2076- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2077
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002078- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2079
2080- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2081 (see PEP 11).
2082
2083- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2084 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2085
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002086C API
2087-----
2088
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002089- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2090 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2091 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2092
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002093- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2094 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2095 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2096 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2097
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002098- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2099 generator objects.
2100
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002101- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2102 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002103 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2104 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002105
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002106- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2107 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2108
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002109- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2110 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2111 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2112 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2113 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2114
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002115- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2116 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2117 about 10% faster.
2118
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002119- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2120 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2121
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002122- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2123 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2124 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2125 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2126
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002127Windows
2128-------
2129
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002130- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2131 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2132 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2133 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2134
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002135- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2136 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2137 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2138
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002139
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002140What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2141===============================
2142
2143*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2144
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002145IDLE
2146----
2147
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002148- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2149 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2150 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2151 context-menu actions.
2152
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002153- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2154 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2155 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2156 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2157 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2158 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2159 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2160 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2161 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2162
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002163
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002164What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2165=============================================
2166
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002167*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002168
2169Core and builtins
2170-----------------
2171
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002172- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002173 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002174 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2175
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002176Extension modules
2177-----------------
2178
2179- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2180 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2181 than once. This has been fixed.
2182
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002183- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2184 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2185 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2186 call.
2187
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002188- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2189
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002190Library
2191-------
2192
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002193- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2194 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2195
2196- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2197 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2198 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2199 restored.
2200
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002201IDLE
2202----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002203
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002204- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002205
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002206Build
2207-----
2208
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002209- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2210 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2211
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002212C API
2213-----
2214
2215Windows
2216-------
2217
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002218- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2219 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2220
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002221- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2222
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002223Mac
2224---
2225
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002226- Various fixes to pimp.
2227
2228- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2229
2230- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2231 more problems than it solves.
2232
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002233
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002234What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2235=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002236
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002237*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2238
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002239Core and builtins
2240-----------------
2241
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002242- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2243 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2244
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002245- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2246 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002247 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002248
2249- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2250 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2251 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002252 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002253
2254- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2255 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002256
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002257- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2258 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2259 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2260
2261- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002262 770247.
2263
2264- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002265
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002266Extension modules
2267-----------------
2268
2269- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2270 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2271
2272- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2273
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002274- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2275
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002276- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2277 contained within the _strptime module.
2278
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002279- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2280 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2281
2282- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002283 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2284
2285- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2286 the find_class attribute, if present.
2287
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002288- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002289
2290 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2291 (SF bug 763298).
2292
2293 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002294 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2295 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2296 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002297
2298 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2299
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002300Library
2301-------
2302
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002303- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2304
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002305- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2306 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2307 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2308 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2309 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2310 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2311 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2312 or Tester().
2313
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002314- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2315 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2316 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2317 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2318 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2319 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2320 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2321 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2322 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002323
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002324 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002325
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002326- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2327 weren't before was an oversight.
2328
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002329- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2330 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2331
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002332- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2333 when there are no lines.
2334
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002335- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2336 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2337
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002338- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2339 to child processes.
2340
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002341- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2342
2343- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2344
2345- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2346 xmlrpclib.
2347
2348- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2349 responses.
2350
2351- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2352 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2353
2354- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2355 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2356 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2357
2358- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2359 used as patterns.
2360
2361- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2362 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2363 than Tk 8.3.
2364
2365- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2366
2367- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002368
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002369Tools/Demos
2370-----------
2371
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002372- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2373
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002374- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2375
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002376- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002377
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002378Build
2379-----
2380
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002381- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2382
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002383- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2384
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002385- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2386 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002387
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002388- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2389 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2390 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002391
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002392C API
2393-----
2394
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002395- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2396 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2397
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002398Windows
2399-------
2400
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002401- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2402 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2403 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2404 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2405 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2406 Python exception ::
2407
2408 thread.error: can't start new thread
2409
2410 is raised now.
2411
2412- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2413 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2414 instead of from DLL teardown.
2415
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002416Mac
2417---
2418
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002419- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002420 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002421 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2422 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2423 the executable in the bundle.
2424
2425- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002426
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002427- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2428
2429- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2430 on Panther.
2431
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002432What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2433================================
2434
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002435*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002436
2437Core and builtins
2438-----------------
2439
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002440- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2441 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2442 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2443 with the -i option.
2444
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002445- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2446 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2447
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002448- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2449 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2450
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002451- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2452 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2453 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2454 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2455 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2456 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2457 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2458 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2459 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2460 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2461 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2462 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2463 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002464
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002465- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2466 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2467 embedded in a lambda expression.
2468
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002469- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2470 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2471 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2472 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2473 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2474
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002475- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2476 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2477 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2478
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002479- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2480 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2481
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002482- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2483 It's writable again.
2484
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002485- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2486 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2487 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002488 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002489
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002490- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2491 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2492 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2493
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002494Extension modules
2495-----------------
2496
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002497- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2498 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2499
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002500- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2501 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2502 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2503 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2504
2505- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2506 collection.
2507
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002508- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2509 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2510 unique within a single program run.
2511
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002512- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2513 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2514
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002515- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2516 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2517
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002518- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2519 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002520
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002521- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2522
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002523- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2524 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2525
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002526- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2527 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2528 for many BSD-derived systems.
2529
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002530
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002531Library
2532-------
2533
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002534- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2535 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2536 primary ones:
2537
2538 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2539 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2540 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2541
2542 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2543 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2544 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2545 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2546 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2547 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2548
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002549- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2550 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2551 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2552 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2553 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2554 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2555 argument.
2556
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002557- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2558 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2559 in the archive.
2560
2561- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2562 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2563
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002564- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2565 569574).
2566
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002567- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2568 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2569 no more.
2570
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002571- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2572 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2573 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2574 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2575 code coverage.
2576
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002577- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2578 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2579 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002580 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2581 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002582
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002583- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2584 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2585 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002586 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002587
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002588- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2589
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002590- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2591 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2592 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2593 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2594
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002595- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2596 handling.
2597
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002598- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2599 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2600
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002601- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2602 in socket.py.
2603
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002604- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2605
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002606- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2607 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2608 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2609 opener with proxy support.
2610
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002611- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2612
2613- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2614
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002615Tools/Demos
2616-----------
2617
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002618- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2619
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002620- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2621
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002622- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2623 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002624
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002625- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2626 files.
2627
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002628Build
2629-----
2630
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002631- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002632 different root directory.
2633
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002634C API
2635-----
2636
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002637- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2638 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2639 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2640 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2641 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2642 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2643 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2644 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2645 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2646 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2647
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002648- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2649 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2650 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2651 from Python.
2652
2653
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002654New platforms
2655-------------
2656
2657None this time.
2658
2659Tests
2660-----
2661
2662- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2663 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2664
2665Windows
2666-------
2667
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002668- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2669
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002670- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2671 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2672 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2673 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2674 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2675 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2676 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2677 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2678 that's what it's for.
2679
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002680Mac
2681---
2682
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002683- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2684 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2685 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2686 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002687- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2688 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2689- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002690
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002691SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2692------------------------------------
2693
2694430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2695598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2696622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2697661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2698683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2699697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2700713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2701724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2702727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2703729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2704730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2705731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2706732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2707733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2708735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2709740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2710744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2711745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2712747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2713749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2714751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2715753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2716755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2717757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2718760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2719
2720
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002721What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2722================================
2723
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002724*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002725
2726Core and builtins
2727-----------------
2728
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002729- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2730 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2731
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002732- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2733 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2734 and cannot be strings).
2735
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002736- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2737 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2738 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2739 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2740
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002741- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2742 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2743 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2744 Python itself.
2745
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002746- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2747 the referenced object, if it has one.
2748
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002749- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2750 the thread started at
2751 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2752
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002753- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2754 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2755 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2756 placed on a list index.
2757
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002758- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2759 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2760 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2761 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2762
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002763- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2764 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2765 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2766 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2767 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2768 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2769 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2770
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002771- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2772 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2773 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2774 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2775 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2776
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002777- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2778 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002779
2780- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2781 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2782 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2783 #693195.)
2784
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002785- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2786 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002787
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002788- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002789 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002790 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2791 interpreter executions, would fail.
2792
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002793- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002794 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002795 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002796
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002797Extension modules
2798-----------------
2799
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002800- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2801 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2802 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2803 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2804
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002805- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2806 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2807
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002808- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2809 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2810 and Greg Chapman.)
2811
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002812- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2813 recursively.
2814
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002815- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002816 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2817 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2818 leaks.
2819
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002820- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2821
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002822- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2823 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2824 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2825 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2826 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2827 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2828 #705836.
2829
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002830- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002831 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2832
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002833- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2834 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2835 See SF bug #692416.
2836
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002837- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2838 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2839
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002840- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2841 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2842 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002843
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002844- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002845 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2846 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2847
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002848- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2849 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2850 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2851 timeouts to work properly.
2852
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002853Library
2854-------
2855
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002856- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2857 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2858 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2859 future release.
2860
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002861- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2862 for querying platform dependent features.
2863
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002864- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002865
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002866- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2867 pickle protocol versions.
2868
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002869- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2870 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2871 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2872
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002873- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2874
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002875- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2876 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2877 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2878 modules.
2879
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002880- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2881 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2882 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2883
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002884- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2885 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2886
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002887- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2888 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2889 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2890
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002891- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002892 MS Office extensions.
2893
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002894- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2895 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2896
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002897- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2898 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2899
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002900- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2901 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2902 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2903 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2904 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2905 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2906
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002907- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2908 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2909 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002910
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002911- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2912 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2913 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2914
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002915- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2916
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002917- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2918 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2919 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2920
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002921Tools/Demos
2922-----------
2923
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002924- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2925 See the module docstring for details.
2926
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002927Build
2928-----
2929
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002930- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2931 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002932
2933C API
2934-----
2935
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002936- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2937
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002938- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2939 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2940 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2941
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002942- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2943 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002944
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002945 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2946 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2947 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002948
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002949- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002950 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2951
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002952- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2953 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2954 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002955
2956New platforms
2957-------------
2958
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002959None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002960
2961Tests
2962-----
2963
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002964- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2965 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002966
2967Windows
2968-------
2969
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002970- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2971 function.
2972
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002973- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2974 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002975
2976Mac
2977---
2978
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002979- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2980 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002981
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002982- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2983 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002984
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002985- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2986 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2987 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002988
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002989- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002990 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2991 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002992
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002993- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2994 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002995
2996
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002997What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2998=================================
2999
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003000*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003001
3002Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003003-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003004
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003005- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3006 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3007 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3008
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003009- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3010 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3011 (SF patch #664376.)
3012
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003013- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3014 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3015 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3016 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3017 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3018 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003019 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003020
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003021- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3022 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3023 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3024 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003025 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003026
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003027- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3028 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3029 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3030 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3031 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3032 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3033 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3034 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3035 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3036 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3037 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3038
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003039- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3040 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3041 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3042 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3043 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3044 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3045
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003046- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3047 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3048
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003049- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3050 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3051 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3052 case.)
3053
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003054- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3055 passed as unicode strings.
3056
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003057- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3058 See SF bug #683467.
3059
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003060- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3061 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3062
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003063- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3064
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003065- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3066
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003067- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3068 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3069 arguments.
3070
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003071- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3072 See SF bug #667147.
3073
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003074- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003075 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003076 See SF bug #676155.
3077
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003078- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003079 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003080 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3081 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3082 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3083 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3084 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3085 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003086
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003087Extension modules
3088-----------------
3089
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003090- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3091 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3092 tp_as_number pointer.
3093
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003094- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3095 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3096 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3097 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3098 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3099
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003100- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3101
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003102- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3103
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003104- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003105 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003106 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3107 patch #678531.)
3108
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003109- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3110 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3111
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003112- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3113 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3114
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003115- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3116
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003117- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3118 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3119 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3120
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003121- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3122
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003123- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3124 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3125
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003126- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003127
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003128- datetime changes:
3129
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003130 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3131
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003132 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3133 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3134 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3135 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3136 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3137 now.
3138
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003139 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003140 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3141 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003142
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003143 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003144 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003145 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3146 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3147 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3148 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003149
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003150 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3151 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3152 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003153 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3154
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003155 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3156 by a later example coded by Guido.
3157
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003158 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003159 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3160 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3161 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003162 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3163 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3164
3165 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3166 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3167 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3168 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3169 tzinfo subclass instance.
3170
3171 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3172 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3173 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3174 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3175 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3176 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3177 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3178 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003179
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003180 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3181 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3182 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3183 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3184 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003185 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3186
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003187 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003188
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003189 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3190 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3191 as a naive datetime object.
3192
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003193 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3194 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3195 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3196
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003197 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3198 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3199 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3200 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3201 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3202 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3203 comparison.
3204
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003205 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3206 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3207 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3208 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003209 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003210
3211 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003212
3213 and ::
3214
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003215 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3216
3217 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3218 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3219 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3220 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3221
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003222 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3223 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3224 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3225 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3226 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3227
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003228 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3229 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003230 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3231 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003232
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003233Library
3234-------
3235
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003236- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3237 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3238
3239- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3240 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3241 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3242 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3243 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3244 See PEP 307 for details.
3245
3246- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3247 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3248
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003249- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3250 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003251 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003252 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3253 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003254 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003255
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003256- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3257 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3258
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003259- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3260 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3261 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3262
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003263- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3264
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003265- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3266 exception.
3267
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003268- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3269 class.
3270
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003271- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3272 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3273 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3274
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003275- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3276 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3277
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003278- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003279 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3280 See SF bug #659228.
3281
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003282- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3283 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3284 See SF patch #651082.
3285
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003286- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003287
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003288- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3289 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3290
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003291- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003292 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003293
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003294- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3295 DOS paths from other platforms.
3296
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003297Tools/Demos
3298-----------
3299
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003300- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3301 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3302 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3303 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3304 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3305 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3306 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3307 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3308 example:
3309
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003310 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3311 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003312
3313 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3314
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003315
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003316Build
3317-----
3318
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003319- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3320 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3321 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003322 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3323
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003324 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3325
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003326- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3327 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3328 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3329 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3330 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3331 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3332 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3333 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3334 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3335
3336- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3337 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3338 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3339 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3340
3341- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3342 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3343
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003344C API
3345-----
3346
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003347- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3348 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003349
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003350- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3351 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3352 tp_as_number pointer.
3353
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003354- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3355 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3356 (SF #681367)
3357
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003358- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3359 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3360 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3361 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003362
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003363Tests
3364-----
3365
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003366- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003367 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3368 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3369 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3370 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3371 pydoc.)
3372
3373- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3374
3375- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003376
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003377Windows
3378-------
3379
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003380- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3381 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3382 time).
3383
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003384- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3385 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3386
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003387- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3388 release without strong cryptography.
3389
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003390- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003391 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003392
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003393- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3394 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3395
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003396Mac
3397---
3398
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003399- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3400 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003401
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003402- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3403 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3404 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003405
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003406- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3407 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003408
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003409- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3410 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3411 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3412 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003413
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003414- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003415 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3416 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3417 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003418
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003419
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003420What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003421=================================
3422
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003423*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003424
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003425Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003426--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003427
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003428- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3429
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003430- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3431 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003432 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003433 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003434 a different meaning than before.
3435
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003436- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003437 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003438 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003439
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003440- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003441 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003442 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003443
3444- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3445 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3446 and deallocation.
3447
3448- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3449 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3450
3451- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3452 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3453 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3454 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3455 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3456
3457- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3458 now detected by the garbage collector.
3459
3460- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3461 [SF bug 519621]
3462
3463- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3464 identifier.
3465
3466- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3467 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3468 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3469 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3470 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3471 [SF bug 563060]
3472
3473- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3474 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3475 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3476 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3477 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3478
3479- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3480 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3481 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3482
3483- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3484
3485- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3486 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3487 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3488 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3489 state of the slots would be lost.)
3490
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003491Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003492-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003493
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003494- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003495 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3496 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3497 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3498 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003499 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3500 Jython 2.1.
3501
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003502- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003503 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003504 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3505 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3506 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3507 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3508 these, see PEP 302.
3509
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003510- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3511 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3512 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3513
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003514- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3515 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3516 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3517
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003518- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3519 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3520 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3521
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003522- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3523 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3524 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3525 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3526 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3527 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3528 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3529 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3530 releases or implementations.
3531
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003532- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003533 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3534 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003535
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003536- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3537 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3538
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003539- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3540 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3541 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3542
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003543- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3544 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3545
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003546- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3547 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003548 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3549 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003550
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003551- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3552 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3553 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3554 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3555 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3556
3557 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3558 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3559 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3560 pattern.
3561
3562 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3563 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3564 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3565 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3566
3567 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3568 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3569 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3570 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3571 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3572 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3573
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003574- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3575 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3576 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3577 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3578 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3579 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3580 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3581 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003582
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003583- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3584 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3585 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3586 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3587 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003588 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3589 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3590 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3591 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3592 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3593 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3594 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003595
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003596- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3597 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3598
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003599- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3600 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3601 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3602 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3603 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3604 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3605 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3606 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3607 to Zack Weinberg!
3608
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003609- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3610 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3611 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3612 type. This has been fixed now.
3613
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003614- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3615 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3616 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3617
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003618- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3619 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3620 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3621 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3622 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3623 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3624 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3625 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003626 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003627
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003628- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3629 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3630 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003631
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003632- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3633 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3634 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3635 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3636 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3637 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3638 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3639 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003640 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003641 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3642 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3643
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003644- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3645 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3646 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3647 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3648 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3649 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3650 this.)
3651
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003652- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3653 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003654 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003655 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003656 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3657 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003658 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3659 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003660
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003661- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3662 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3663 currently running.
3664
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003665- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3666 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3667 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3668 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3669
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003670- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3671 as directory names.
3672
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003673- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3674 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3675
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003676- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3677 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3678
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003679- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003680 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3681 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003682
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003683- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3684 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3685 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3686 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3687 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3688
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003689- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3690 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3691 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3692 removed.
3693
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003694- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3695 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3696 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3697
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003698- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3699 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3700 to __debug__.
3701
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003702- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3703 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3704 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3705
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003706- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3707 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3708 deprecated now.
3709
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003710- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3711 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3712 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003713
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003714- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3715 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3716 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3717 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3718 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003719
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003720- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3721 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3722
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003723- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3724 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3725 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003726 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003727 is backward compatible.
3728
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003729- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3730 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3731 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3732 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3733 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3734
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003735- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3736 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3737 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3738 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3739 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3740 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003741
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003742- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3743 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3744
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003745- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3746 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3747
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003748- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3749 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3750 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3751 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3752 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3753
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003754- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3755 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3756 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3757
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003758- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003759 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3760
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003761- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3762 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3763 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003764
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003765- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3766 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3767
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003768- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3769 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3770 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3771
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003772- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3773
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003774Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003775-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003776
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003777- Added three operators to the operator module:
3778 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3779 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3780 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3781
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003782- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3783
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003784- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3785 archives.
3786
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003787- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3788 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3789 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3790
3791 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3792
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003793- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3794 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3795 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003796 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003797
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003798- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3799 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3800 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3801 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003802 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3803 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3804 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3805 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003806
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003807- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3808 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003809
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003810- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3811
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003812- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3813 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3814
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003815- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3816 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3817 supported.
3818
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003819- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3820
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003821- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3822 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003823
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003824- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3825 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3826
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003827- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3828
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003829- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3830 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3831
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003832- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3833 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3834 functions but callable type objects.
3835
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003836- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003837 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003838 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003839
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003840- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3841 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003842
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003843- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3844 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003845
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003846- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3847 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3848 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3849 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3850
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003851- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3852 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003853
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003854- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3855 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3856 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3857 and __imul__.
3858
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003859- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003860 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3861 is called.
3862
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003863- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3864 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3865 interpreter was compiled.
3866
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003867- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3868 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3869 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003870 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003871 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3872 1, not 2.
3873
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003874- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3875 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3876 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3877 limit.
3878
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003879- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3880 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3881 bug #623464.
3882
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003883- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3884 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3885 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3886 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3887
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003888Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003889-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003890
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003891- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3892
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003893- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3894 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3895 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3896 with Python 2.3a2.
3897
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003898- os.path exposes getctime.
3899
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003900- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003901 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003902 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003903 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003904 unit tests of floating point results.
3905
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003906- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3907 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3908 has been increased.
3909
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003910- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3911 executed.
3912
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003913- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3914 postinstallation script.
3915
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003916- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3917 test the current module.
3918
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003919- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003920 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3921 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3922 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3923 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3924
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003925- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003926 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003927 Ward's Optik package.
3928
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003929- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3930 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3931 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3932 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3933
3934- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3935 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003936 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003937
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003938- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3939 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3940 shelf are binary pickles.
3941
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003942- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3943 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3944
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003945- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3946 modules are iterators now.
3947
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003948- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3949 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3950 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3951 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3952 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3953 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003954
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003955- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3956 with their entity value.
3957
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003958- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3959
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003960- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3961 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003962
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003963- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3964 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003965 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003966
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003967- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3968 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3969 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3970 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3971 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3972 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3973 main():
3974
3975 import locale
3976 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3977
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003978- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3979 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3980
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003981- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3982 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3983 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3984 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3985 to the new standard.
3986
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003987- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3988 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3989 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3990 an extension to the database.
3991
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003992- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3993 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3994 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3995 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003996 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003997
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003998- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003999 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004000
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004001- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4002 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4003 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4004 bounded integers.
4005
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004006- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4007 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4008 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4009 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4010 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4011 in existence.
4012
4013 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4014 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4015 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4016 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4017 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4018 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4019
4020 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4021 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4022 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4023 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4024
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004025- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4026 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4027 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4028
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004029- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4030
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004031- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4032 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4033 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4034 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4035
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004036- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4037 argument.
4038
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004039- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4040 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4041 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4042 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4043 [SF patch 560794].
4044
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004045- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4046 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4047 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004048 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4049 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4050 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004051
4052- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4053 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004054
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004055- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4056 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4057 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4058 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004059
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004060- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4061 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4062 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4063 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4064 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4065
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004066- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004067
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004068- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4069
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004070- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4071 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4072 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4073 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4074 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4075 identical to None.
4076
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004077- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4078 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4079 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4080 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4081 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4082 results now.
4083
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004084- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4085 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4086
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004087- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4088 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4089 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4090 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4091 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4092 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4093 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4094 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4095
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004096- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4097
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004098- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4099 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4100
4101- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4102 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4103 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4104 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4105 and other systems.
4106
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004107- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4108 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4109 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4110 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 +00004111 work well with these.
4112
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004113- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4114
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004115- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004116 connections.
4117
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004118- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4119 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4120 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4121
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004122- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4123 sets
4124
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004125- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4126 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4127 name.
4128
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004129- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4130 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4131 passed in.
4132
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004133- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004134 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004135 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4136 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004137
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004138- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4139
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004140- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4141
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004142- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4143 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4144 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4145
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004146- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4147 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4148 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4149 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004150 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004151
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004152- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004153 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004154 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004155
4156- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4157 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4158 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4159
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004160- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004161 the value of its expression argument.
4162
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004163- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4164 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4165 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4166
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004167- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4168 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4169 skipstone browser was included.
4170
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004171- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4172 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4173
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004174Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004175-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004176
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004177- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4178 names in addition to accepting file names.
4179
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004180- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4181 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4182 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4183 still used and useful.)
4184
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004185- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4186 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4187 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4188 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004189
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004190- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4191 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4192 the generated binary.
4193
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004194Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004195-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004196
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004197- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4198
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004199- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4200 except in the hands of experts.
4201
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004202- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004203 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4204 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4205 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004206
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004207- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4208 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4209 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4210 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4211 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4212 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4213 builds.
4214
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004215- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4216 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4217 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4218 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4219 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4220 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4221 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4222 new type.
4223
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004224- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004225
4226 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4227 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4228 positive infinities.
4229
4230 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4231 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4232 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4233 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4234 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4235 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4236 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4237
4238 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4239
4240 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4241
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004242- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4243 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4244 size of the executable.
4245
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004246- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4247 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4248 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4249 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004250
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004251- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4252
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004253- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4254 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4255 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004256
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004257- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4258 well as Unix.
4259
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004260- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4261 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4262 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4263 modules in the README file for details.
4264
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004265C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004266-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004267
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004268- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4269 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004270 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004271 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004272 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004273
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004274- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4275 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4276 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4277 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4278 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4279 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004280 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004281 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4282 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4283 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4284 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4285 aligned.)
4286
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004287- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4288 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4289 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4290
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004291- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4292 level.
4293
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004294- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4295 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4296 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4297 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4298 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4299
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004300- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4301 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4302 code.
4303
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004304- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4305 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4306 adjusting for negative indices.
4307
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004308- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4309 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4310 object.
4311
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004312- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4313 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4314 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4315
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004316- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4317 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004318
4319- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4320
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004321- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4322 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4323 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4324 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4325
4326- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4327
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004328- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004329
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004330- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004331 without going through the buffer API.
4332
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004333- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004334
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004335- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4336 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4337 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4338 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4339
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004340- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4341 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4342
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004343- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004344 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4345
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004346New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004347-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004348
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004349- OpenVMS is now supported.
4350
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004351- AtheOS is now supported.
4352
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004353- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4354
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004355- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4356
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004357Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004358-----
4359
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004360- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4361 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4362 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004363
4364Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004365-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004366
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004367- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4368 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4369 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4370 bugs.
4371 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004372 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004373 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4374 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004375 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004376
4377- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004378 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004379
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004380- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4381 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4382
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004383- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4384 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004385 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004386 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4387
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004388- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4389 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4390 use files" uninstall option).
4391
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004392- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4393
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004394- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4395 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4396
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004397- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4398 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4399 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4400
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004401- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4402 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4403 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4404 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4405 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004406 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4407 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4408 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004409
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004410- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004411 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004412 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4413 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4414 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4415 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4416 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4417 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4418 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4419 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4420 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4421 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4422 work around.
4423
4424- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4425 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4426 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4427 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4428 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4429 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4430 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4431 specified with O_CREAT too).
4432
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004433Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004434----
4435
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004436- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004437
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004438- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4439 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4440 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4441
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004442- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4443 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4444 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4445
4446- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4447 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4448 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4449 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4450 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4451 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4452 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4453 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004454
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004455- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4456 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4457 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004458
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004459- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4460 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4461 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4462 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4463 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004464
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004465- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4466 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4467 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004468
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004469- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4470 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004471
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004472- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4473 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4474 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4475 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4476 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004477
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004478- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4479 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4480 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4481
4482- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4483 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4484 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004485
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004486- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4487 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4488 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4489 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004490 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004491
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004492- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4493 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004494
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004495- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4496 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004497
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004498- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004499 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004500 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4501 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004502
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004503
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004504What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004505===============================
4506
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004507*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4508
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004509Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004510--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004511
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004512- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4513 with a custom metaclass.
4514
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004515Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004516-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004517
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004518- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4519 are proxies.
4520
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004521Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004522-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004523
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004524- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4525 very short strings.
4526
4527- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4528 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4529 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4530 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4531 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4532
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004533Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004534-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004535
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004536- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4537 close or delete time).
4538
4539- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4540 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4541
4542- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4543
4544- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004545 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004546
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004547Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004548-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004549
4550Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004551-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004552
4553C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004554-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004555
4556New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004557-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004558
4559Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004560-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004561
4562Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004563-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004564
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004565- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4566
4567- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4568 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4569
4570- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4571 deleted at process exit time.
4572
4573- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4574 in backslash.
4575
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004576Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004577----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004578
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004579- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4580 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4581 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4582
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004583
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004584What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004585===========================
4586
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004587*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4588
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004589Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004590--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004591
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004592- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4593 been extensively updated. See
4594
4595 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4596
4597 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4598
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004599- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4600 deleted!
4601
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004602- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4603 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4604 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4605 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4606 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4607
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004608- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4609
4610 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4611 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4612
4613 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4614 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4615 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4616 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4617 supported anyway.
4618
4619 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4620 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4621
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004622- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4623 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4624 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4625 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4626 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004627
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004628- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4629 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4630 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4631
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004632Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004633-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004634
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004635- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4636 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4637 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4638 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4639 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4640 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004641 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4642 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4643 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4644 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004645
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004646- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4647 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4648 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4649
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004650Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004651-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004652
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004653- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4654
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004655Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004656-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004657
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004658- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4659 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4660 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4661 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4662 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4663 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4664
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004665- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4666
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004667- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4668
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004669- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4670
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004671- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4672 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4673 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4674
4675- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4676
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004677Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004678-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004679
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004680- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4681 off a search on Google.
4682
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004683Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004684-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004685
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004686- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4687 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4688 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4689 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4690 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4691 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4692 other platforms should do likewise.
4693
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004694- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4695 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4696 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4697
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004698C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004699-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004700
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004701- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4702 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4703 producing key-value pairs.
4704
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004705- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004706 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004707 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4708 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4709 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4710 previously went unchallenged.
4711
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004712New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004713-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004714
4715Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004716-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004717
4718Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004719-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004720
4721Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004722----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004723
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004724- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4725 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004726
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004727- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4728 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4729 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4730 home.
4731
4732
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004733What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004734===========================
4735
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004736*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4737
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004738Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004739--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004740
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004741- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4742 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004743
4744 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004745 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004746
4747 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4748 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004749 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004750 This needs to be documented.
4751
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004752- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4753 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4754
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004755- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4756 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4757 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4758
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004759- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4760 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4761
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004762- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4763 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4764 class forbids it).
4765
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004766- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4767 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4768 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4769
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004770- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4771
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004772Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004773-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004774
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004775- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4776 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004777 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004778
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004779- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4780 (like 1 + '').
4781
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004782Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004783-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004784
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004785- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4786 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4787 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4788 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004789 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004790 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4791
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004792- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4793 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4794 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4795 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4796
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004797- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4798 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004799 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4800 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4801 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004802
4803- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4804 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004805
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004806- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4807 bytes on its input.
4808
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004809Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004810-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004811
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004812- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004813 convenience function.
4814
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004815- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4816 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4817 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004818 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4819 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4820 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4821 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4822 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4823 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004824
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004825- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4826 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4827 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4828 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4829
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004830- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4831 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4832 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4833
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004834- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4835 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4836 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4837 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4838
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004839- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4840 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004841 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004842 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4843 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4844 new -l and -e options.
4845
4846- statcache is now deprecated.
4847
4848- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4849 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004850 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004851 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4852 time properly taken into account.
4853
4854- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4855 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4856 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4857 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4858
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004859Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004860-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004861
4862Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004863-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004864
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004865- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4866 is built with libdb3 if available.
4867
4868- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4869
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004870C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004871-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004872
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004873- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4874 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4875 PySequence_Size().
4876
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004877- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4878
4879- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4880 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4881 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4882
4883- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4884 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4885
4886- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4887 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4888
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004889New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004890-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004891
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004892- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4893 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4894
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004895- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4896 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4897
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004898- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4899
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004900Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004901-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004902
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004903- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4904 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4905
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004906Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004907-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004908
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004909Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004910----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004911
4912- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4913 removed completely in the next release.
4914
4915- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4916 OSX.
4917
4918- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4919 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4920
4921- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4922
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004923
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004924What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004925===========================
4926
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004927*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4928
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004929Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004930--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004931
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004932- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004933 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004934 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004935 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4936 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004937 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4938 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004939 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4940 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004941
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004942- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4943 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4944
4945- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4946 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4947
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004948Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004949-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004950
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004951- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4952 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4953 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4954 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4955 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4956 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4957 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4958 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4959
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004960- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4961 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4962 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4963 example).
4964
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004965- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004966 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004967 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004968 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004969
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004970- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4971 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4972 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004973 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004974
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004975- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4976 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4977 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4978 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4979 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4980 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4981
4982 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4983
4984 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4985
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004986Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004987-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004988
4989- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4990
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004991- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4992
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004993- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4994 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004995
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004996- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4997 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4998 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4999 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5000 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5001 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005002 attributes.
5003
5004- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5005 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5006 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005007
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005008- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5009 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5010 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005011
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005012- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5013 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5014 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005015 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5016 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5017
5018- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5019 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005020
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005021Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005022-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005023
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005024- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5025 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5026
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005027- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5028 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5029 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5030 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5031
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005032- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5033 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5034 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5035 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5036
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005037 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5038 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5039 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5040 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5041 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5042 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5043 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5044 without losing information).
5045
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005046- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005047 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5048 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5049 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5050 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5051 module).
5052
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005053 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005054 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5055 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5056 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5057 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005058
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005059- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005060 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5061 encoding.
5062
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005063- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5064 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5065
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005066- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005067 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5068
5069- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5070 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5071 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5072 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5073
5074- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5075
5076- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5077 ON, and OFF.
5078
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005079- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5080 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5081
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005082Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005083-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005084
5085- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5086 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5087 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005088
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005089- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5090 been added: -X and -E.
5091
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005092Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005093-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005094
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005095- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5096 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5097
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005098C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005099-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005100
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005101- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5102 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5103 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5104 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5105 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5106
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005107- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5108 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5109 as long) arguments.
5110
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005111- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5112 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5113 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5114 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5115 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5116 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5117
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005118- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5119 input.
5120
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005121New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005122-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005123
5124Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005125-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005126
5127Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005128-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005129
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005130- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5131 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5132 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5133
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005134- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5135 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5136 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005137 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005138
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005139 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5140 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5141 import signal
5142 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005143
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005144 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005145 while 1:
5146 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005147 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005148 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5149 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5150 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5151 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005152
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005153
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005154What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5155===========================
5156
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005157*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5158
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005159Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005160--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005161
5162- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5163 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5164 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5165
5166- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5167 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5168 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5169 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5170 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5171 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5172 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005173
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005174- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005175 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005176 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5177 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5178 associate a docstring with a property.
5179
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005180- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5181 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5182 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5183 other built-in object types.
5184
5185- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5186 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5187 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5188 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5189 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5190
5191- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5192 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5193
5194- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5195 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005196 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005197 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5198 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5199 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5200 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5201 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5202
5203- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5204 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5205 class.
5206
5207- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5208 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5209 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5210 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5211
5212- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5213 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5214 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5215 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5216
5217- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5218 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5219
5220- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5221 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5222 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5223 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5224 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005225 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005226 with the same value as s.
5227
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005228- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5229
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005230Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005231----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005232
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005233- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5234
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005235- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5236 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5237 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5238 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5239 objects.
5240
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005241- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5242 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005243 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5244 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5245
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005246- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5247 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5248 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5249
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005250Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005251-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005252
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005253- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5254 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5255 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5256 by the instances.
5257
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005258- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5259 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5260 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5261
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005262- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5263 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5264 before the entire comparison is complete.
5265
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005266- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5267 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5268 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5269
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005270- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5271 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5272 getwriter().
5273
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005274- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5275 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5276
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005277- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005278 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5279 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5280
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005281- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5282 iterable object.
5283
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005284- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5285 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005286
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005287- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5288 authentication.
5289
5290- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5291 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005292
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005293- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005294 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5295 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5296 a sample driver.)
5297
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005298Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005299-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005300
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005301- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5302 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5303 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5304 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5305 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5306 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5307 kernel has large file support.
5308
5309- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5310 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5311 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5312 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5313 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5314
5315- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5316 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5317 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5318
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005319C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005320-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005321
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005322- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5323 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5324
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005325New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005326-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005327
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005328- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5329 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5330
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005331Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005332-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005333
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005334- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5335 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5336 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5337 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5338 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5339
5340- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5341 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5342 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5343 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5344
5345- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5346 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5347
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005348Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005349-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005350
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005351- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005352 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5353 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005354
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005355
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005356What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5357===========================
5358
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005359*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5360
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005361Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005362----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005363
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005364- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5365 big to represent as a C double.
5366
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005367- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5368 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5369 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5370 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5371 restriction).
5372
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005373- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5374 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5375 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5376 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5377 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5378
5379 >>> dir([])
5380 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5381 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5382 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5383 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5384 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5385 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5386 'reverse', 'sort']
5387
5388 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5389
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005390- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005391 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5392 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5393 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5394 OverflowError exception.
5395
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005396- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005397 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005398 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5399 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5400 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5401 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5402 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005403 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005404 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5405 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5406
5407 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5408 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5409 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5410 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005411
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005412- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005413 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5414 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5415 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5416 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5417 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5418 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5419 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5420 once it is created.
5421
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005422- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5423 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5424 (key, value) pairs.
5425
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005426- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005427 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5428 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5429
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005430- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5431 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5432 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5433 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5434 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005435
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005436- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005437 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5438 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5439
5440 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5441
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005442- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005443 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5444
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005445Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005446-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005447
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005448- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005449 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5450 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005451
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005452- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5453 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5454 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5455 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5456 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5457 in this area anymore).
5458
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005459- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5460 threading.Timer.
5461
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005462- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5463 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5464
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005465- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005466 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5467
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005468- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005469 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5470 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5471 converted to Python longs.
5472
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005473- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005474 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5475
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005476- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5477 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5478 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5479
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005480Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005481-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005482
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005483- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5484 division operators as per PEP 238.
5485
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005486Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005487-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005488
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005489- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5490 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5491 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5492 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5493
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005494C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005495-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005496
5497- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005498
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005499- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5500 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005501 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005502
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005503 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5504 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005505 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005506 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005507
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005508- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005509 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5510 module:
5511
5512 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005513
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005514 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5515 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005516
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005517 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5518 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005519
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005520 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5521
5522 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5523
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005524- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005525 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5526 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5527 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005528
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005529New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005530-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005531
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005532- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5533 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5534 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5535 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5536 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005537
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005538Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005539-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005540
5541Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005542-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005543
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005544- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5545 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5546 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5547 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005548 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5549 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5550 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5551 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5552 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005553
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005554- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005555 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5556
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005557
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005558What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5559===========================
5560
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005561*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5562
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005563Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005564-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005565
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005566- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5567 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5568
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005569- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5570 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5571 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005572
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005573- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5574 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5575 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5576 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005577
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005578- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5579
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005580- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005581
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005582Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005583-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005584
5585- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005586 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005587 the module docstring for details.
5588
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005589Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005590-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005591
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005592- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005593 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5594 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5595 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005596
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005597- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5598 Nick Mathewson.
5599
5600Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005601----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005602
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005603- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5604 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5605 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5606 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5607 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5608 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5609 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5610 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5611
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005612- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5613 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5614 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5615 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5616
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005617- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5618 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5619 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5620 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5621 come a long way).
5622
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005623- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5624 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5625 write filters for these warnings).
5626
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005627- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5628 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5629 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5630 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5631 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5632
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005633- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5634 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5635 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5636 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5637 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5638 older distribution.
5639
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005640Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005641-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005642
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005643- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5644 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005645 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005646
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005647- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5648 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5649 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5650
5651- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5652
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005653- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5654
5655- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5656
5657- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5658
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005659- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005660
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005661- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5662
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005663New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005664-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005665
5666C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005667-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005668
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005669- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5670 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5671 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5672 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5673 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5674 against buffer overruns.
5675
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005676- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005677 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5678 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005679 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5680 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5681 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5682
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005683- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5684 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5685 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5686 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5687 deprecated.
5688
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005689Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005690-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005691
5692- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5693 relevant is found.
5694
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005695
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005696What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005697===========================
5698
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005699*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5700
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005701Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005702----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005703
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005704- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5705 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5706 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5707 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5708 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5709 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5710 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5711 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005712 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005713 repaired.
5714
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005715- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005716 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005717 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5718 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5719 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5720 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5721 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5722 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5723 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5724 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5725
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005726- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5727 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5728 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5729 leading BMO character).
5730
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005731- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5732 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5733 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5734
5735 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5736 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5737 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005738
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005739 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5740 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5741 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5742 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5743 for various simple to use conversions.
5744
5745 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5746 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5747
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005748 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5749 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5750 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5751 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5752 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5753 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5754 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5755 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5756 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5757 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5758 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5759 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5760 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5761 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5762 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005763
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005764- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5765 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5766 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005767 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005768 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005769
5770 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005771 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5772 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5773 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5774 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5775 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005776 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5777 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005778
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005779 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5780 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5781 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005782 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005783
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005784- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5785 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5786 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5787 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5788 floating arithmetic,
5789
5790 x = 9007199254740992.0
5791 print long(x)
5792
5793 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5794 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5795 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5796 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5797 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5798 functions are of good quality).
5799
5800 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5801 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5802 algorithms to break.
5803
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005804- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5805 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5806 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5807 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5808 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5809 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5810 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5811 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5812 order.
5813
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005814- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5815 operation along the most common code paths.
5816
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005817- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5818 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5819
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005820- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5821 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5822 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5823 {}.update(UserDict())
5824
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005825- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5826 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5827 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5828 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5829 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5830 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5831 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5832 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5833
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005834- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005835 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005836
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005837 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005838 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5839 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005840 join() method of strings
5841 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005842 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5843 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005844 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005845 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005846
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005847- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5848 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5849
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005850- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5851 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5852
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005853- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5854 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5855 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5856 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5857
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005858- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5859 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005860 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005861 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5862 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005863
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005864- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5865
5866
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005867Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005868-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005869
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005870- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005871 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005872 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5873 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5874
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005875- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5876 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5877
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005878- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5879 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5880 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5881 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5882
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005883- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5884 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5885 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5886
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005887- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5888
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005889- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5890
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005891- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5892 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5893 that are still imported into string.py).
5894
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005895- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5896
5897- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5898 Now it does.
5899
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005900- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5901
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005902- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5903 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5904 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5905 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5906 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005907 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5908 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005909
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005910- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5911 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5912 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5913 'help(object)'.
5914
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005915Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005916-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005917
5918- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005919 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005920 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5921 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5922
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005923- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005924 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5925 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005926
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005927C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005928-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005929
5930- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5931 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005932
5933----
5934
5935**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**