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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000011
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +000015- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
16 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
17 arguments.
18
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000019Extension modules
20-----------------
21
22- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
23
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +000024- datetime changes:
25
26 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
27 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>.
28
Tim Peters710fb152003-01-02 19:35:54 +000029 In dt.asdatetime(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +000030 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Peters710fb152003-01-02 19:35:54 +000031 as 0 instead).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +000032
33 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
34 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
35 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
36 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
37
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000038Library
39-------
40
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000041TBD
42
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000043Tools/Demos
44-----------
45
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000046TBD
47
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000048Build
49-----
50
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +000051- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
52 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
53 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
54 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
55 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
56 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
57 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
58 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
59 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
60
61- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
62 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
63 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
64 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
65
66- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
67 from the Tools/scripts directory.
68
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000069C API
70-----
71
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000072TBD
73
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000074New platforms
75-------------
76
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000077TBD
78
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000079Tests
80-----
81
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000082TBD
83
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000084Windows
85-------
86
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +000087- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
88 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
89
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000090Mac
91---
92
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000093TBD
94
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000095
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000096What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000097=================================
98
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +000099*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000100
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000101Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000102--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000103
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000104- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
105
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000106- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
107 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000108 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000109 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000110 a different meaning than before.
111
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000112- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000113 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000114 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000115
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000116- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000117 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000118 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000119
120- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
121 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
122 and deallocation.
123
124- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
125 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
126
127- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
128 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
129 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
130 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
131 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
132
133- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
134 now detected by the garbage collector.
135
136- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
137 [SF bug 519621]
138
139- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
140 identifier.
141
142- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
143 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
144 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
145 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
146 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
147 [SF bug 563060]
148
149- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
150 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
151 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
152 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
153 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
154
155- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
156 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
157 not called. [SF bug #537450]
158
159- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
160
161- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
162 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
163 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
164 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
165 state of the slots would be lost.)
166
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000167Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000168-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000169
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000170- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000171 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
172 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
173 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
174 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000175 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
176 Jython 2.1.
177
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000178- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was inititally developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000179 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000180 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
181 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
182 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
183 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
184 these, see PEP 302.
185
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000186- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
187 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
188 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
189
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000190- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
191 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
192 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
193
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000194- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
195 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
196 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
197
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000198- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
199 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
200 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
201 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
202 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
203 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
204 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
205 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
206 releases or implementations.
207
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000208- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000209 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
210 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000211
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000212- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
213 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
214
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000215- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
216 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
217 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
218
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000219- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
220 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
221
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000222- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
223 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000224 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
225 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000226
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000227- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
228 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
229 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
230 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
231 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
232
233 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
234 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
235 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
236 pattern.
237
238 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
239 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
240 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
241 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
242
243 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
244 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
245 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
246 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
247 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
248 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
249
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000250- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
251 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
252 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
253 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
254 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
255 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
256 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
257 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000258
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000259- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
260 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
261 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
262 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
263 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000264 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
265 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
266 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
267 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
268 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
269 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
270 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000271
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000272- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
273 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
274
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000275- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
276 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
277 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
278 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
279 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
280 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
281 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
282 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
283 to Zack Weinberg!
284
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000285- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
286 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
287 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
288 type. This has been fixed now.
289
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000290- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
291 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
292 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
293
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000294- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
295 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
296 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
297 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
298 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
299 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
300 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
301 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000302 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000303
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000304- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
305 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
306 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000307
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000308- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
309 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
310 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
311 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
312 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
313 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
314 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
315 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000316 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000317 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
318 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
319
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000320- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
321 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
322 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
323 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
324 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
325 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
326 this.)
327
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000328- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
329 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000330 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000331 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000332 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
333 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000334 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
335 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000336
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000337- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
338 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
339 currently running.
340
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000341- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
342 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
343 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
344 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
345
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000346- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
347 as directory names.
348
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000349- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
350 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
351
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000352- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
353 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
354
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000355- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000356 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
357 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000358
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000359- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
360 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
361 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
362 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
363 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
364
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000365- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
366 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
367 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
368 removed.
369
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000370- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
371 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
372 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
373
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000374- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
375 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
376 to __debug__.
377
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000378- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
379 string to the left with zeros. For example,
380 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
381
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000382- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
383 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
384 deprecated now.
385
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000386- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
387 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
388 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000389
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000390- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
391 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
392 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
393 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
394 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000395
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000396- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
397 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
398
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000399- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
400 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
401 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000402 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000403 is backward compatible.
404
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000405- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
406 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
407 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
408 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
409 could access a pointer to freed memory.
410
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000411- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
412 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
413 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
414 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
415 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
416 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000417
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000418- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
419 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
420
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000421- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
422 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
423
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000424- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
425 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
426 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
427 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
428 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
429
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000430- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
431 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
432 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
433
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000434- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000435 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
436
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +0000437- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
438 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
439 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +0000440
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +0000441- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
442 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
443
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +0000444- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
445 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
446 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
447
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000448Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000449-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000450
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +0000451- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
452
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000453- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
454 archives.
455
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +0000456- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
457 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
458 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
459
460 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
461
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000462- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
463 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
464 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000465 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000466
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +0000467- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
468 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
469 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
470 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
471 3.0 to 4.1.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000472
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +0000473- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
474 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +0000475
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000476- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
477
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000478- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
479 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
480
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +0000481- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
482 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
483 supported.
484
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +0000485- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
486
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +0000487- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
488 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +0000489
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +0000490- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
491 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
492
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000493- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
494
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000495- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
496 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
497
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000498- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
499 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
500 functions but callable type objects.
501
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000502- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000503 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000504 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000505
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +0000506- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
507 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +0000508
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +0000509- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
510 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +0000511
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +0000512- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
513 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
514 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
515 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
516
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +0000517- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
518 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +0000519
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +0000520- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
521 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
522 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
523 and __imul__.
524
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +0000525- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +0000526 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
527 is called.
528
Michael W. Hudson34f20ea2002-05-27 15:08:24 +0000529- signal.sigpending, signal.sigprocmask and signal.sigsuspend have
530 been added where available.
531
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +0000532- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
533 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
534 interpreter was compiled.
535
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000536- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
537 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
538 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000539 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000540 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
541 1, not 2.
542
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +0000543- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
544 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
545 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
546 limit.
547
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +0000548- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
549 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
550 bug #623464.
551
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000552Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000553-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000554
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +0000555- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
556 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
557 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
558 with Python 2.3a2.
559
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +0000560- os.path exposes getctime.
561
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +0000562- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
563 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparision
564 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
565 the result to zero. Approximate comparision is essential for
566 unit tests of floating point results.
567
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +0000568- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
569 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
570 has been increased.
571
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000572- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
573 executed.
574
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +0000575- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
576 postinstallation script.
577
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +0000578- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
579 test the current module.
580
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +0000581- When cancelling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
582 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
583 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
584 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
585 this behavior needs to be controlled.
586
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000587- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000588 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000589 Ward's Optik package.
590
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000591- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
592 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
593 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
594 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
595
596- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
597 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000598 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000599
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +0000600- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
601 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
602 shelf are binary pickles.
603
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +0000604- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
605 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
606
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +0000607- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
608 modules are iterators now.
609
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +0000610- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
611 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
612 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
613 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
614 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
615 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000616
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +0000617- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
618 with their entity value.
619
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +0000620- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
621
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000622- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
623 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +0000624
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000625- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
626 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000627 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +0000628
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +0000629- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
630 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
631 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
632 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
633 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
634 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
635 main():
636
637 import locale
638 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
639
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +0000640- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
641 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
642
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +0000643- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
644 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
645 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
646 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
647 to the new standard.
648
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +0000649- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
650 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
651 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
652 an extension to the database.
653
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000654- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
655 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
656 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
657 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +0000658 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000659
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000660- Added operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to a**b.
661
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000662- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000663 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000664
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000665- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
666 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
667 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
668 bounded integers.
669
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +0000670- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
671 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
672 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
673 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
674 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
675 in existence.
676
677 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
678 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
679 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
680 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
681 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
682 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
683
684 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
685 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
686 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
687 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
688
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +0000689- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
690 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
691 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
692
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +0000693- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
694
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000695- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
696 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
697 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
698 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
699
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +0000700- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
701 argument.
702
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +0000703- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
704 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
705 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
706 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
707 [SF patch 560794].
708
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000709- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
710 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
711 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000712 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
713 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
714 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000715
716- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
717 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +0000718
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +0000719- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
720 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
721 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
722 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +0000723
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +0000724- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
725 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
726 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
727 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
728 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
729
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000730- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +0000731
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +0000732- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
733
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +0000734- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
735 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
736 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
737 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
738 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
739 identical to None.
740
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +0000741- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
742 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
743 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
744 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
745 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
746 results now.
747
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +0000748- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
749 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
750
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000751- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
752 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
753 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
754 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
755 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
756 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
757 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
758 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
759
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +0000760- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
761
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +0000762- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
763 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
764
765- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
766 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
767 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
768 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
769 and other systems.
770
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000771- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
772 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
773 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
774 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 +0000775 work well with these.
776
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +0000777- compileall now supports quiet operation.
778
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000779- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +0000780 connections.
781
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +0000782- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
783 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
784 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
785
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +0000786- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
787 sets
788
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +0000789- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
790 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
791 name.
792
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +0000793- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
794 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
795 passed in.
796
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000797- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +0000798 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +0000799 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
800 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +0000801
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +0000802- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
803
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +0000804- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
805
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +0000806- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
807 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
808 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
809
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +0000810- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
811 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
812 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
813 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +0000814 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +0000815
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000816- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +0000817 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000818 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +0000819
820- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
821 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
822 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
823
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000824- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +0000825 the value of its expression argument.
826
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000827- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
828 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
829 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
830
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +0000831- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
832 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
833 skipstone browser was included.
834
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +0000835- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
836 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
837
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000838Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000839-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000840
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +0000841- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
842 names in addition to accepting file names.
843
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +0000844- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
845 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
846 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
847 still used and useful.)
848
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +0000849- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
850 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
851 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
852 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +0000853
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +0000854- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
855 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
856 the generated binary.
857
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000858Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000859-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000860
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +0000861- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
862
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000863- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
864 except in the hands of experts.
865
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000866- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000867 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
868 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
869 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +0000870
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +0000871- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
872 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
873 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
874 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
875 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
876 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
877 builds.
878
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000879- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
880 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
881 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
882 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
883 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
884 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
885 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
886 new type.
887
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +0000888- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +0000889
890 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
891 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
892 positive infinities.
893
894 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
895 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
896 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
897 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
898 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
899 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
900 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
901
902 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
903
904 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
905
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +0000906- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
907 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
908 size of the executable.
909
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000910- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
911 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
912 configure script. On other platforms, remove
913 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +0000914
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +0000915- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
916
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +0000917- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
918 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
919 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +0000920
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +0000921- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
922 well as Unix.
923
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +0000924- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
925 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
926 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
927 modules in the README file for details.
928
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000929C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000930-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000931
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +0000932- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
933 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +0000934 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +0000935 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +0000936 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +0000937
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000938- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
939 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
940 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
941 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
942 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
943 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
944 strings are now usually mortal; theres a new API,
945 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
946 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
947 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
948 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
949 aligned.)
950
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +0000951- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
952 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
953 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
954
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000955- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
956 level.
957
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +0000958- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
959 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
960 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
961 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
962 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
963
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +0000964- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
965 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
966 code.
967
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +0000968- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
969 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
970 adjusting for negative indices.
971
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000972- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
973 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
974 object.
975
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +0000976- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
977 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
978 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
979
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000980- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
981 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +0000982
983- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
984
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +0000985- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
986 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
987 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
988 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
989
990- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
991
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +0000992- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000993
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000994- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +0000995 without going through the buffer API.
996
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000997- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +0000998
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +0000999- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1000 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1001 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1002 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1003
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001004- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1005 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1006
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001007- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001008 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1009
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001010New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001011-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001012
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001013- OpenVMS is now supported.
1014
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001015- AtheOS is now supported.
1016
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001017- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1018
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001019- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1020
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001021Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001022-----
1023
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001024- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1025 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1026 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001027
1028Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001029-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001030
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001031- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1032 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1033 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1034 bugs.
1035 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001036 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous verion of
1037 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1038 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001039 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001040
1041- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001042 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001043
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001044- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1045 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1046
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001047- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1048 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
1049 MSVC 6, sys.version constains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
1050 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1051
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001052- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1053 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1054 use files" uninstall option).
1055
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001056- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1057
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001058- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1059 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1060
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001061- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1062 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1063 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1064
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001065- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1066 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1067 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1068 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1069 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001070 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1071 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1072 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001073
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001074- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001075 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001076 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1077 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1078 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1079 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1080 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1081 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1082 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1083 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1084 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1085 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1086 work around.
1087
1088- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1089 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1090 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1091 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1092 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1093 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1094 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1095 specified with O_CREAT too).
1096
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001097Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001098----
1099
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001100- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001101
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001102- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1103 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1104 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1105
1106- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1107 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1108 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1109 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1110 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1111 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1112 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1113 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001114
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001115- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1116 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1117 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001118
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001119- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1120 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1121 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1122 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1123 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001124
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001125- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1126 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1127 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001128
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001129- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1130 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001131
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001132- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1133 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1134 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1135 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1136 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001137
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001138- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1139 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1140 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1141
1142- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1143 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1144 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001145
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001146- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1147 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1148 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1149 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
1150 Help Viewer comaptible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001151
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001152- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1153 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001154
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001155- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1156 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001157
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001158What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001159===============================
1160
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001161*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1162
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001163Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001164--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001165
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001166- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1167 with a custom metaclass.
1168
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001169Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001170-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001171
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001172- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1173 are proxies.
1174
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001175Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001176-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001177
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001178- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1179 very short strings.
1180
1181- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1182 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1183 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1184 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1185 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1186
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001187Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001188-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001189
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001190- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1191 close or delete time).
1192
1193- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1194 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1195
1196- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1197
1198- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001199 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001200
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001201Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001202-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001203
1204Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001205-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001206
1207C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001208-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001209
1210New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001211-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001212
1213Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001214-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001215
1216Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001217-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001218
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001219- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1220
1221- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1222 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1223
1224- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1225 deleted at process exit time.
1226
1227- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1228 in backslash.
1229
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001230Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001231----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001232
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001233- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1234 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1235 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1236
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001237
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001238What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001239===========================
1240
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001241*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1242
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001243Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001244--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001245
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001246- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1247 been extensively updated. See
1248
1249 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1250
1251 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1252
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001253- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1254 deleted!
1255
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001256- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1257 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1258 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1259 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1260 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1261
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001262- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1263
1264 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1265 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1266
1267 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1268 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1269 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1270 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1271 supported anyway.
1272
1273 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1274 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1275
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001276- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1277 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1278 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1279 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1280 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001281
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001282- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1283 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1284 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1285
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001286Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001287-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001288
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001289- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1290 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1291 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1292 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1293 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1294 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001295 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1296 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1297 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1298 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001299
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001300- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1301 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1302 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1303
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001304Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001305-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001306
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001307- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1308
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001309Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001310-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001311
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001312- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1313 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1314 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1315 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1316 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1317 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1318
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001319- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1320
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001321- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1322
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001323- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1324
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001325- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1326 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1327 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1328
1329- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1330
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001331Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001332-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001333
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001334- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1335 off a search on Google.
1336
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001337Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001338-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001339
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001340- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1341 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1342 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1343 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1344 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1345 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1346 other platforms should do likewise.
1347
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001348- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1349 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1350 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1351
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001352C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001353-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001354
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001355- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1356 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1357 producing key-value pairs.
1358
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001359- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001360 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001361 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1362 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1363 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1364 previously went unchallenged.
1365
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001366New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001367-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001368
1369Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001370-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001371
1372Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001373-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001374
1375Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001376----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001377
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001378- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1379 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001380
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001381- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1382 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1383 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1384 home.
1385
1386
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001387What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001388===========================
1389
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001390*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1391
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001392Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001393--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001394
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001395- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1396 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001397
1398 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001399 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001400
1401 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1402 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001403 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001404 This needs to be documented.
1405
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001406- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1407 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1408
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001409- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1410 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1411 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1412
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001413- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1414 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1415
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001416- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1417 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1418 class forbids it).
1419
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001420- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1421 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1422 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1423
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001424- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1425
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001426Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001427-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001428
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001429- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1430 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001431 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001432
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001433- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1434 (like 1 + '').
1435
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001436Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001437-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001438
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001439- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1440 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1441 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1442 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001443 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001444 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1445
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001446- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1447 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1448 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1449 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1450
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001451- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1452 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001453 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1454 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1455 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001456
1457- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1458 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001459
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001460- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1461 bytes on its input.
1462
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001463Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001464-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001465
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001466- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001467 convenience function.
1468
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001469- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
1470 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
1471 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001472 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
1473 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
1474 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
1475 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
1476 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
1477 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001478
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00001479- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
1480 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
1481 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
1482 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
1483
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00001484- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
1485 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
1486 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
1487
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001488- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
1489 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
1490 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
1491 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
1492
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001493- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
1494 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001495 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001496 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
1497 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
1498 new -l and -e options.
1499
1500- statcache is now deprecated.
1501
1502- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
1503 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001504 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001505 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
1506 time properly taken into account.
1507
1508- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
1509 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
1510 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
1511 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
1512
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001513Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001514-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001515
1516Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001517-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001518
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001519- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
1520 is built with libdb3 if available.
1521
1522- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
1523
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001524C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001525-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001526
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00001527- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
1528 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
1529 PySequence_Size().
1530
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001531- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
1532
1533- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
1534 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
1535 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
1536
1537- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
1538 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
1539
1540- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
1541 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
1542
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001543New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001544-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001545
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001546- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
1547 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
1548
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00001549- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
1550 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
1551
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001552- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
1553
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001554Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001555-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001556
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001557- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
1558 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
1559
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001560Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001561-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001562
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001563Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001564----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001565
1566- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
1567 removed completely in the next release.
1568
1569- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
1570 OSX.
1571
1572- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
1573 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
1574
1575- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
1576
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001577
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001578What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001579===========================
1580
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001581*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
1582
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001583Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001584--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001585
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001586- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001587 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001588 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001589 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
1590 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001591 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
1592 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001593 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
1594 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00001595
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00001596- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
1597 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
1598
1599- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
1600 class methods, static methods, and properties.
1601
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001602Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001603-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001604
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00001605- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
1606 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
1607 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
1608 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
1609 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
1610 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
1611 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
1612 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
1613
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001614- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
1615 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
1616 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
1617 example).
1618
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001619- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001620 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001621 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001622 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001623
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001624- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
1625 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
1626 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00001627 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001628
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001629- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
1630 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
1631 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
1632 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
1633 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
1634 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
1635
1636 isinstance(x, (A, B))
1637
1638 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
1639
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001640Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001641-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001642
1643- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
1644
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001645- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
1646
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001647- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
1648 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00001649
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001650- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
1651 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
1652 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
1653 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
1654 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
1655 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00001656 attributes.
1657
1658- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
1659 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
1660 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00001661
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001662- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
1663 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
1664 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001665
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001666- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
1667 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
1668 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001669 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
1670 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
1671
1672- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
1673 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001674
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001675Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001676-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001677
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00001678- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
1679 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
1680
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001681- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
1682 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
1683 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
1684 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
1685
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00001686- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
1687 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
1688 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
1689 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
1690
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00001691 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
1692 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
1693 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
1694 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
1695 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
1696 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
1697 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
1698 without losing information).
1699
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001700- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00001701 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
1702 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
1703 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
1704 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
1705 module).
1706
1707 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overriden by subclasses.
1708 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
1709 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
1710 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
1711 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001712
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001713- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00001714 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
1715 encoding.
1716
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00001717- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
1718 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
1719
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001720- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001721 to allow saving the message body to a file.
1722
1723- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
1724 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
1725 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
1726 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
1727
1728- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
1729
1730- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
1731 ON, and OFF.
1732
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001733- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
1734 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
1735
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001736Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001737-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001738
1739- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
1740 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
1741 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001742
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001743- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
1744 been added: -X and -E.
1745
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001746Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001747-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001748
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001749- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
1750 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
1751
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001752C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001753-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001754
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00001755- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
1756 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
1757 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
1758 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
1759 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
1760
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00001761- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
1762 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
1763 as long) arguments.
1764
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001765- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
1766 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
1767 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
1768 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
1769 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
1770 report any bugs or strange behavior).
1771
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001772- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
1773 input.
1774
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001775New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001776-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001777
1778Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001779-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001780
1781Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001782-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001783
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00001784- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
1785 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
1786 is created for .py and .pyw files.
1787
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001788- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
1789 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
1790 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001791 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001792
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001793 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
1794 # (SIGINT) behavior.
1795 import signal
1796 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001797
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001798 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001799 while 1:
1800 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001801 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001802 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
1803 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
1804 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
1805 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001806
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001807
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001808What's New in Python 2.2a4?
1809===========================
1810
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001811*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
1812
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001813Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001814--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001815
1816- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
1817 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
1818 documentation for all operations on list objects.
1819
1820- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
1821 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
1822 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
1823 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
1824 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
1825 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
1826 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001827
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001828- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001829 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001830 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
1831 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
1832 associate a docstring with a property.
1833
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001834- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
1835 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
1836 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
1837 other built-in object types.
1838
1839- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
1840 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
1841 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
1842 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
1843 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
1844
1845- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
1846 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
1847
1848- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
1849 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001850 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001851 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
1852 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
1853 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
1854 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
1855 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
1856
1857- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
1858 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
1859 class.
1860
1861- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
1862 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
1863 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
1864 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
1865
1866- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
1867 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
1868 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
1869 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
1870
1871- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
1872 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
1873
1874- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
1875 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
1876 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
1877 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
1878 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001879 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001880 with the same value as s.
1881
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00001882- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
1883
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001884Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001885----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001886
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00001887- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
1888
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00001889- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
1890 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
1891 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
1892 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
1893 objects.
1894
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001895- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
1896 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00001897 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
1898 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
1899
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001900- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
1901 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
1902 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
1903
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001904Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001905-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001906
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00001907- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1908 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
1909 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
1910 by the instances.
1911
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00001912- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
1913 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
1914 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
1915
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001916- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
1917 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
1918 before the entire comparison is complete.
1919
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00001920- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1921 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
1922 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
1923
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00001924- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
1925 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
1926 getwriter().
1927
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001928- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
1929 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
1930
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00001931- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001932 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
1933 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
1934
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00001935- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
1936 iterable object.
1937
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001938- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
1939 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00001940
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001941- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
1942 authentication.
1943
1944- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
1945 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00001946
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001947- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00001948 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
1949 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
1950 a sample driver.)
1951
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001952Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001953-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001954
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001955- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
1956 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
1957 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
1958 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
1959 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
1960 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
1961 kernel has large file support.
1962
1963- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
1964 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
1965 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
1966 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
1967 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
1968
1969- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
1970 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
1971 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
1972
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001973C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001974-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001975
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001976- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
1977 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
1978
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001979New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001980-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001981
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001982- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
1983 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
1984
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001985Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001986-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001987
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001988- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
1989 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
1990 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
1991 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
1992 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
1993
1994- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
1995 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
1996 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
1997 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
1998
1999- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2000 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2001
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002002Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002003-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002004
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002005- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002006 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2007 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002008
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002009
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002010What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2011===========================
2012
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002013*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2014
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002015Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002016----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002017
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002018- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2019 big to represent as a C double.
2020
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002021- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2022 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2023 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2024 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2025 restriction).
2026
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002027- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2028 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2029 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2030 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2031 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2032
2033 >>> dir([])
2034 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2035 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2036 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2037 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2038 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2039 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2040 'reverse', 'sort']
2041
2042 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2043
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002044- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002045 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2046 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2047 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2048 OverflowError exception.
2049
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002050- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002051 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002052 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2053 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2054 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2055 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2056 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002057 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002058 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2059 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2060
2061 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2062 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2063 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2064 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002065
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002066- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002067 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2068 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2069 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2070 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2071 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2072 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2073 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2074 once it is created.
2075
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002076- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2077 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2078 (key, value) pairs.
2079
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002080- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002081 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2082 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2083
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002084- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2085 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2086 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2087 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2088 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002089
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002090- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002091 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2092 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2093
2094 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2095
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002096- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002097 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2098
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002099Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002100-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002101
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002102- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002103 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2104 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002105
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002106- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2107 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2108 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2109 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2110 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2111 in this area anymore).
2112
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002113- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2114 threading.Timer.
2115
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002116- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2117 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2118
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002119- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002120 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2121
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002122- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002123 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2124 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2125 converted to Python longs.
2126
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002127- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002128 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2129
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002130- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2131 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2132 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2133
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002134Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002135-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002136
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002137- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2138 division operators as per PEP 238.
2139
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002140Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002141-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002142
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002143- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2144 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2145 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2146 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2147
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002148C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002149-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002150
2151- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002152
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002153- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2154 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002155 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002156
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002157 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2158 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002159 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002160 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002161
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002162- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002163 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2164 module:
2165
2166 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002167
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002168 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2169 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002170
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002171 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2172 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002173
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002174 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2175
2176 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2177
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002178- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002179 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2180 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2181 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002182
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002183New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002184-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002185
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002186- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2187 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2188 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2189 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2190 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002191
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002192Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002193-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002194
2195Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002196-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002197
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002198- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2199 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2200 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2201 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002202 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2203 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2204 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2205 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2206 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002207
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002208- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002209 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2210
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002211
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002212What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2213===========================
2214
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002215*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2216
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002217Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002218-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002219
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002220- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2221 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2222
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002223- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2224 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2225 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002226
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002227- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2228 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2229 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2230 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002231
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002232- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2233
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002234- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002235
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002236Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002237-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002238
2239- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002240 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002241 the module docstring for details.
2242
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002243Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002244-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002245
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002246- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002247 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2248 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2249 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002250
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002251- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2252 Nick Mathewson.
2253
2254Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002255----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002256
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002257- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2258 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2259 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2260 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2261 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2262 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2263 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2264 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2265
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002266- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2267 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2268 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2269 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2270
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002271- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2272 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2273 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2274 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2275 come a long way).
2276
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002277- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2278 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2279 write filters for these warnings).
2280
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002281- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2282 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2283 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2284 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2285 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2286
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002287- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2288 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2289 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2290 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2291 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2292 older distribution.
2293
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002294Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002295-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002296
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002297- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2298 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002299 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002300
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002301- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2302 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2303 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2304
2305- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2306
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002307- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2308
2309- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2310
2311- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2312
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002313- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002314
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002315- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2316
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002317New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002318-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002319
2320C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002321-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002322
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002323- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2324 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2325 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2326 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2327 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2328 against buffer overruns.
2329
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002330- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002331 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2332 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002333 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2334 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2335 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2336
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002337- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2338 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2339 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2340 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2341 deprecated.
2342
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002343Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002344-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002345
2346- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2347 relevant is found.
2348
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002349
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002350What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002351===========================
2352
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002353*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2354
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002355Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002356----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002357
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002358- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2359 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2360 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2361 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2362 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2363 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2364 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2365 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002366 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002367 repaired.
2368
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002369- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002370 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002371 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2372 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2373 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2374 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2375 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2376 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2377 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2378 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2379
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002380- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2381 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2382 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2383 leading BMO character).
2384
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002385- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2386 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2387 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2388
2389 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2390 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2391 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002392
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002393 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2394 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2395 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2396 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2397 for various simple to use conversions.
2398
2399 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2400 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2401
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002402 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2403 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2404 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2405 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2406 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2407 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2408 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2409 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2410 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2411 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2412 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2413 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2414 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2415 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2416 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002417
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002418- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2419 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2420 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002421 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002422 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002423
2424 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002425 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2426 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2427 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2428 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2429 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002430 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2431 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002432
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002433 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2434 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2435 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002436 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002437
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002438- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2439 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2440 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2441 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2442 floating arithmetic,
2443
2444 x = 9007199254740992.0
2445 print long(x)
2446
2447 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2448 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2449 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2450 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2451 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2452 functions are of good quality).
2453
2454 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2455 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2456 algorithms to break.
2457
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002458- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2459 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2460 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2461 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2462 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2463 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2464 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2465 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2466 order.
2467
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002468- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
2469 operation along the most common code paths.
2470
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002471- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
2472 the same as dict.has_key(x).
2473
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00002474- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
2475 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
2476 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
2477 {}.update(UserDict())
2478
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002479- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
2480 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
2481 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
2482 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
2483 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
2484 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
2485 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
2486 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
2487
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002488- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002489 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002490
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002491 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00002492 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
2493 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00002494 join() method of strings
2495 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002496 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
2497 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002498 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00002499 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002500
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00002501- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
2502 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
2503
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002504- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
2505 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
2506
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00002507- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
2508 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
2509 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
2510 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
2511
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002512- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
2513 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002514 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002515 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
2516 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00002517
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00002518- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
2519
2520
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002521Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002522-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002523
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002524- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002525 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002526 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
2527 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
2528
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00002529- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
2530 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
2531
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00002532- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
2533 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
2534 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
2535 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
2536
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00002537- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
2538 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
2539 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
2540
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00002541- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
2542
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00002543- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
2544
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00002545- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
2546 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
2547 that are still imported into string.py).
2548
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002549- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
2550
2551- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
2552 Now it does.
2553
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002554- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
2555
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002556- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
2557 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
2558 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
2559 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
2560 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002561 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
2562 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002563
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00002564- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
2565 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
2566 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
2567 'help(object)'.
2568
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002569Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002570-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002571
2572- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002573 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002574 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
2575 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
2576
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002577- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002578 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
2579 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002580
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002581C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002582-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002583
2584- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
2585 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002586
2587----
2588
2589**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**