blob: d6fe41dbd222d9060b4ffc1b08086a7447f4c02c [file] [log] [blame]
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
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +000015- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
16 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
17 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
18 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
19 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
20 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
21 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
22
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +000023- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
24 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
25 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
26 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
27 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
28
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +000029- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
30 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +000031
32- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
33 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
34 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
35 #693195.)
36
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +000037- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
38 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000039
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +000040- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +000041 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +000042 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
43 interpreter executions, would fail.
44
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +000045- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +000046 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +000047 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +000048
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000049Extension modules
50-----------------
51
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +000052- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
53 recursively.
54
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +000055- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +000056 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
57 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
58 leaks.
59
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +000060- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
61
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +000062- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
63 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
64 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
65 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
66 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
67 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
68 #705836.
69
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +000070- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzet()
71 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
72
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +000073- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
74 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
75 See SF bug #692416.
76
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +000077- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
78 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
79
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +000080- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
81 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
82 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000083
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +000084- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
85 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
86 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
87 timeouts to work properly.
88
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000089Library
90-------
91
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +000092- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
93 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
94
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +000095- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
96 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
97 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
98
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +000099- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000100 MS Office extensions.
101
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000102- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
103 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
104
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000105- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
106 execution speed of expressions and statements.
107
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000108- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
109 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
110 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
111 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
112 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
113 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
114
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000115- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
116 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
117 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000118
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +0000119- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
120 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
121 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
122
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +0000123- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
124
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000125Tools/Demos
126-----------
127
128TBD
129
130Build
131-----
132
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000133- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
134 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000135
136C API
137-----
138
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +0000139- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG.
140
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +0000141- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +0000142 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
143
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +0000144- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
145 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
146 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000147
148New platforms
149-------------
150
151TBD
152
153Tests
154-----
155
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +0000156- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
157 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000158
159Windows
160-------
161
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +0000162- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
163 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000164
165Mac
166---
167
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000168- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
169 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +0000170
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +0000171- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
172 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000173
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +0000174- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
175 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
176 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000177
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000178- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
179 be used by mere mortals.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000180
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000181- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
182 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000183
184
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000185What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
186=================================
187
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000188*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000189
190Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000191-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000192
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +0000193- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
194 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
195 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
196
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +0000197- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
198 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
199 (SF patch #664376.)
200
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000201- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
202 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
203 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
204 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
205 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
206 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +0000207 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000208
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000209- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
210 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
211 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
212 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000213 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000214
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +0000215- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
216 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
217 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
218 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
219 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
220 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
221 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
222 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
223 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
224 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
225 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
226
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +0000227- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
228 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
229 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
230 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
231 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
232 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
233
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +0000234- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
235 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
236
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +0000237- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
238 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
239 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
240 case.)
241
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +0000242- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
243 passed as unicode strings.
244
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +0000245- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
246 See SF bug #683467.
247
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +0000248- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
249 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
250
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +0000251- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
252
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +0000253- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
254
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +0000255- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
256 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
257 arguments.
258
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +0000259- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
260 See SF bug #667147.
261
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000262- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000263 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000264 See SF bug #676155.
265
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000266- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000267 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000268 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
269 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
270 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
271 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
272 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
273 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000274
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000275Extension modules
276-----------------
277
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000278- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
279 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
280 tp_as_number pointer.
281
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000282- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
283 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
284 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
285 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
286 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
287
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000288- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
289
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +0000290- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
291
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000292- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000293 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000294 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
295 patch #678531.)
296
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000297- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
298 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
299
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000300- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
301 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
302
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000303- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
304
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000305- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
306 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
307 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
308
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000309- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
310
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000311- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
312 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
313
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000314- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000315
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000316- datetime changes:
317
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000318 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
319 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
320 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
321 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
322 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
323 now.
324
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000325 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000326 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
327 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000328
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000329 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000330 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000331 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
332 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
333 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
334 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000335
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000336 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
337 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
338 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000339 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
340
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000341 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
342 by a later example coded by Guido.
343
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000344 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000345 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
346 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
347 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000348 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
349 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
350
351 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
352 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
353 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
354 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
355 tzinfo subclass instance.
356
357 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
358 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
359 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
360 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
361 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
362 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
363 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
364 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000365
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000366 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
367 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
368 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
369 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
370 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000371 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
372
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000373 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000374
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000375 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
376 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
377 as a naive datetime object.
378
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000379 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
380 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
381 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
382
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000383 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
384 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
385 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
386 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
387 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
388 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
389 comparison.
390
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000391 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
392 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
393 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
394 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000395 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000396
397 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000398
399 and ::
400
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000401 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
402
403 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
404 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
405 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
406 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
407
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000408 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
409 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
410 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
411 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
412 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
413
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000414 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
415 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000416 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
417 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000418
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000419Library
420-------
421
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000422- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
423 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
424
425- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
426 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
427 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
428 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
429 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
430 See PEP 307 for details.
431
432- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
433 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
434
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000435- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
436 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000437 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000438 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
439 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000440 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000441
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000442- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
443 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
444
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000445- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
446 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
447 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
448
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000449- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
450
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000451- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
452 exception.
453
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000454- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
455 class.
456
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000457- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
458 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
459 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
460
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000461- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
462 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
463
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000464- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000465 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
466 See SF bug #659228.
467
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000468- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
469 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
470 See SF patch #651082.
471
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000472- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000473
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000474- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
475 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
476
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000477- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000478 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000479
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +0000480- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
481 DOS paths from other platforms.
482
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000483Tools/Demos
484-----------
485
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000486- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
487 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
488 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
489 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
490 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
491 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
492 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
493 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
494 example:
495
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000496 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
497 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000498
499 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
500
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000501
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000502Build
503-----
504
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000505- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
506 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
507 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000508 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
509
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000510 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
511
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000512- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
513 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
514 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
515 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
516 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
517 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
518 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
519 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
520 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
521
522- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
523 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
524 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
525 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
526
527- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
528 from the Tools/scripts directory.
529
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000530C API
531-----
532
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000533- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
534 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +0000535
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000536- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
537 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
538 tp_as_number pointer.
539
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +0000540- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
541 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
542 (SF #681367)
543
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000544- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
545 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
546 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
547 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000548
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000549Tests
550-----
551
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +0000552- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000553 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
554 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
555 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
556 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
557 pydoc.)
558
559- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
560
561- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000562
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000563Windows
564-------
565
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000566- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
567 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
568 time).
569
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000570- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
571 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
572
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000573- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
574 release without strong cryptography.
575
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000576- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000577 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000578
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000579- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
580 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
581
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000582Mac
583---
584
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000585- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
586 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000587
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000588- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
589 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
590 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000591
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000592- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
593 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000594
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000595- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
596 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
597 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
598 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000599
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000600- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +0000601 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
602 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
603 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000604
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000605
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000606What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000607=================================
608
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000609*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000610
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000611Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000612--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000613
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000614- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
615
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000616- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
617 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000618 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000619 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000620 a different meaning than before.
621
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000622- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000623 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000624 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000625
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000626- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000627 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000628 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000629
630- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
631 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
632 and deallocation.
633
634- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
635 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
636
637- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
638 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
639 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
640 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
641 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
642
643- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
644 now detected by the garbage collector.
645
646- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
647 [SF bug 519621]
648
649- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
650 identifier.
651
652- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
653 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
654 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
655 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
656 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
657 [SF bug 563060]
658
659- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
660 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
661 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
662 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
663 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
664
665- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
666 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
667 not called. [SF bug #537450]
668
669- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
670
671- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
672 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
673 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
674 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
675 state of the slots would be lost.)
676
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000677Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000678-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000679
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000680- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000681 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
682 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
683 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
684 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000685 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
686 Jython 2.1.
687
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000688- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000689 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000690 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
691 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
692 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
693 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
694 these, see PEP 302.
695
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000696- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
697 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
698 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
699
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000700- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
701 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
702 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
703
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000704- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
705 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
706 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
707
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000708- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
709 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
710 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
711 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
712 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
713 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
714 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
715 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
716 releases or implementations.
717
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000718- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000719 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
720 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000721
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000722- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
723 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
724
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000725- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
726 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
727 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
728
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000729- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
730 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
731
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000732- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
733 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000734 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
735 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000736
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000737- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
738 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
739 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
740 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
741 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
742
743 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
744 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
745 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
746 pattern.
747
748 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
749 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
750 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
751 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
752
753 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
754 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
755 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
756 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
757 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
758 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
759
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000760- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
761 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
762 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
763 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
764 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
765 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
766 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
767 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000768
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000769- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
770 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
771 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
772 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
773 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000774 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
775 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
776 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
777 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
778 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
779 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
780 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000781
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000782- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
783 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
784
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000785- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
786 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
787 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
788 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
789 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
790 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
791 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
792 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
793 to Zack Weinberg!
794
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000795- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
796 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
797 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
798 type. This has been fixed now.
799
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000800- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
801 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
802 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
803
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000804- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
805 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
806 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
807 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
808 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
809 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
810 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
811 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000812 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000813
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000814- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
815 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
816 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000817
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000818- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
819 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
820 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
821 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
822 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
823 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
824 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
825 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000826 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000827 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
828 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
829
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000830- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
831 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
832 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
833 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
834 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
835 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
836 this.)
837
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000838- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
839 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000840 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000841 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000842 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
843 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000844 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
845 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000846
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000847- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
848 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
849 currently running.
850
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000851- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
852 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
853 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
854 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
855
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000856- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
857 as directory names.
858
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000859- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
860 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
861
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000862- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
863 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
864
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000865- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000866 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
867 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000868
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000869- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
870 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
871 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
872 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
873 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
874
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000875- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
876 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
877 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
878 removed.
879
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000880- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
881 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
882 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
883
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000884- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
885 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
886 to __debug__.
887
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000888- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
889 string to the left with zeros. For example,
890 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
891
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000892- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
893 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
894 deprecated now.
895
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000896- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
897 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
898 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000899
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000900- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
901 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
902 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
903 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
904 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000905
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000906- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
907 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
908
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000909- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
910 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
911 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000912 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000913 is backward compatible.
914
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000915- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
916 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
917 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
918 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
919 could access a pointer to freed memory.
920
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000921- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
922 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
923 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
924 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
925 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
926 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000927
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000928- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
929 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
930
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000931- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
932 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
933
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000934- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
935 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
936 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
937 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
938 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
939
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000940- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
941 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
942 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
943
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000944- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000945 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
946
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +0000947- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
948 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
949 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +0000950
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +0000951- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
952 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
953
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +0000954- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
955 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
956 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
957
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +0000958- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
959
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000960Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000961-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000962
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +0000963- Added three operators to the operator module:
964 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
965 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
966 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
967
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +0000968- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
969
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000970- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
971 archives.
972
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +0000973- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
974 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
975 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
976
977 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
978
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000979- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
980 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
981 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000982 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000983
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +0000984- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
985 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
986 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
987 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000988 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
989 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
990 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
991 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000992
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +0000993- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
994 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +0000995
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000996- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
997
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000998- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
999 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1000
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001001- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1002 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1003 supported.
1004
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001005- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1006
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001007- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1008 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001009
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001010- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1011 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1012
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001013- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1014
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001015- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1016 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1017
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001018- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1019 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1020 functions but callable type objects.
1021
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001022- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001023 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001024 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001025
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001026- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1027 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001028
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001029- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1030 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001031
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001032- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1033 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1034 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1035 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1036
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001037- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1038 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001039
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001040- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1041 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1042 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1043 and __imul__.
1044
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001045- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001046 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1047 is called.
1048
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001049- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1050 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1051 interpreter was compiled.
1052
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001053- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1054 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1055 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001056 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001057 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1058 1, not 2.
1059
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001060- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1061 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1062 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1063 limit.
1064
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001065- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1066 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1067 bug #623464.
1068
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001069- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1070 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1071 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1072 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1073
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001074Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001075-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001076
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001077- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1078
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001079- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1080 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1081 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1082 with Python 2.3a2.
1083
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001084- os.path exposes getctime.
1085
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001086- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001087 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001088 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001089 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001090 unit tests of floating point results.
1091
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001092- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1093 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1094 has been increased.
1095
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001096- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1097 executed.
1098
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001099- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1100 postinstallation script.
1101
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001102- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1103 test the current module.
1104
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001105- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001106 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1107 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1108 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1109 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1110
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001111- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001112 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001113 Ward's Optik package.
1114
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001115- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1116 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1117 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1118 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1119
1120- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1121 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001122 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001123
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001124- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1125 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1126 shelf are binary pickles.
1127
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001128- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1129 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1130
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001131- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1132 modules are iterators now.
1133
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001134- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1135 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1136 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1137 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1138 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1139 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001140
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001141- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1142 with their entity value.
1143
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001144- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1145
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001146- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1147 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001148
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001149- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1150 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001151 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001152
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001153- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1154 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1155 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1156 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1157 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1158 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1159 main():
1160
1161 import locale
1162 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1163
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001164- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1165 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1166
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001167- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1168 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1169 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1170 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1171 to the new standard.
1172
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001173- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1174 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1175 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1176 an extension to the database.
1177
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001178- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1179 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1180 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1181 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001182 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001183
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001184- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001185 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001186
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001187- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1188 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1189 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1190 bounded integers.
1191
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001192- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1193 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1194 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1195 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1196 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1197 in existence.
1198
1199 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1200 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1201 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
1202 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
1203 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
1204 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
1205
1206 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
1207 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1208 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1209 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1210
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001211- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1212 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1213 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1214
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001215- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1216
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001217- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1218 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1219 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1220 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1221
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001222- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1223 argument.
1224
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001225- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1226 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1227 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1228 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1229 [SF patch 560794].
1230
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001231- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1232 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1233 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001234 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1235 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1236 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001237
1238- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1239 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001240
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001241- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1242 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1243 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1244 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001245
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001246- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1247 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1248 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1249 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1250 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1251
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001252- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001253
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001254- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1255
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001256- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1257 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1258 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1259 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1260 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1261 identical to None.
1262
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001263- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1264 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1265 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1266 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1267 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1268 results now.
1269
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001270- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1271 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1272
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001273- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1274 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1275 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1276 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1277 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1278 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1279 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1280 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1281
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001282- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1283
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001284- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1285 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1286
1287- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1288 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1289 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1290 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1291 and other systems.
1292
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001293- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1294 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1295 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1296 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 +00001297 work well with these.
1298
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001299- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1300
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001301- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001302 connections.
1303
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001304- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1305 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1306 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1307
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001308- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1309 sets
1310
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001311- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1312 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1313 name.
1314
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001315- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1316 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1317 passed in.
1318
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001319- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001320 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001321 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1322 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001323
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001324- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1325
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001326- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1327
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001328- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1329 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1330 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1331
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001332- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1333 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1334 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1335 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001336 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001337
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001338- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001339 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001340 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001341
1342- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1343 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1344 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1345
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001346- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001347 the value of its expression argument.
1348
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001349- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1350 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1351 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1352
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001353- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1354 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1355 skipstone browser was included.
1356
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001357- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1358 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1359
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001360Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001361-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001362
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001363- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1364 names in addition to accepting file names.
1365
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001366- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1367 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1368 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1369 still used and useful.)
1370
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001371- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1372 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1373 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1374 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001375
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001376- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1377 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1378 the generated binary.
1379
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001380Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001381-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001382
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001383- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1384
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001385- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1386 except in the hands of experts.
1387
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001388- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001389 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1390 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1391 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001392
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001393- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1394 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1395 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1396 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1397 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1398 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1399 builds.
1400
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001401- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1402 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1403 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1404 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1405 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1406 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1407 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1408 new type.
1409
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001410- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001411
1412 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1413 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1414 positive infinities.
1415
1416 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1417 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1418 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1419 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1420 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1421 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1422 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1423
1424 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1425
1426 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1427
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001428- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1429 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1430 size of the executable.
1431
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001432- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1433 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1434 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1435 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001436
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001437- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1438
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001439- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1440 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1441 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001442
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001443- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1444 well as Unix.
1445
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001446- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1447 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1448 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1449 modules in the README file for details.
1450
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001451C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001452-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001453
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001454- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1455 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001456 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001457 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001458 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001459
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001460- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1461 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1462 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1463 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1464 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1465 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001466 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001467 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1468 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1469 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1470 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1471 aligned.)
1472
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001473- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1474 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1475 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1476
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001477- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1478 level.
1479
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001480- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1481 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1482 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1483 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1484 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1485
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001486- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1487 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1488 code.
1489
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001490- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1491 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1492 adjusting for negative indices.
1493
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001494- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1495 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1496 object.
1497
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001498- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1499 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1500 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1501
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001502- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1503 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001504
1505- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1506
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001507- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1508 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1509 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1510 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1511
1512- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1513
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001514- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001515
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001516- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001517 without going through the buffer API.
1518
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001519- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001520
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001521- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1522 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1523 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1524 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1525
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001526- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1527 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1528
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001529- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001530 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1531
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001532New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001533-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001534
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001535- OpenVMS is now supported.
1536
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001537- AtheOS is now supported.
1538
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001539- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1540
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001541- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1542
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001543Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001544-----
1545
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001546- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1547 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1548 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001549
1550Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001551-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001552
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001553- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1554 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1555 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1556 bugs.
1557 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001558 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001559 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1560 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001561 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001562
1563- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001564 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001565
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001566- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1567 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1568
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001569- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1570 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001571 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001572 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1573
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001574- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1575 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1576 use files" uninstall option).
1577
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001578- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1579
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001580- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1581 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1582
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001583- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1584 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1585 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1586
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001587- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1588 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1589 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1590 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1591 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001592 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1593 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1594 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001595
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001596- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001597 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001598 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1599 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1600 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1601 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1602 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1603 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1604 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1605 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1606 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1607 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1608 work around.
1609
1610- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1611 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1612 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1613 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1614 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1615 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1616 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1617 specified with O_CREAT too).
1618
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001619Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001620----
1621
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001622- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001623
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00001624- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
1625 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
1626 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
1627
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001628- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1629 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1630 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1631
1632- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1633 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1634 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1635 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1636 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1637 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1638 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1639 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001640
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001641- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1642 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1643 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001644
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001645- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1646 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1647 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1648 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1649 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001650
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001651- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1652 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1653 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001654
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001655- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1656 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001657
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001658- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1659 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1660 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1661 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1662 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001663
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001664- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1665 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1666 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1667
1668- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1669 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1670 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001671
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001672- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1673 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1674 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1675 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001676 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001677
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001678- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1679 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001680
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001681- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1682 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001683
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001684- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00001685 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001686 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1687 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001688
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001689
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001690What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001691===============================
1692
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001693*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1694
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001695Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001696--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001697
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001698- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1699 with a custom metaclass.
1700
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001701Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001702-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001703
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001704- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1705 are proxies.
1706
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001707Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001708-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001709
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001710- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1711 very short strings.
1712
1713- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1714 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1715 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1716 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1717 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1718
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001719Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001720-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001721
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001722- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1723 close or delete time).
1724
1725- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1726 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1727
1728- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1729
1730- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001731 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001732
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001733Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001734-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001735
1736Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001737-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001738
1739C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001740-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001741
1742New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001743-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001744
1745Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001746-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001747
1748Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001749-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001750
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001751- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1752
1753- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1754 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1755
1756- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1757 deleted at process exit time.
1758
1759- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1760 in backslash.
1761
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001762Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001763----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001764
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001765- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1766 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1767 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1768
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001769
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001770What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001771===========================
1772
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001773*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1774
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001775Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001776--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001777
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001778- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1779 been extensively updated. See
1780
1781 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1782
1783 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1784
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001785- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1786 deleted!
1787
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001788- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1789 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1790 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1791 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1792 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1793
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001794- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1795
1796 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1797 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1798
1799 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1800 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1801 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1802 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1803 supported anyway.
1804
1805 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1806 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1807
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001808- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1809 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1810 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1811 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1812 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001813
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001814- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1815 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1816 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1817
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001818Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001819-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001820
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001821- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1822 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1823 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1824 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1825 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1826 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001827 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1828 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1829 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1830 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001831
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001832- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1833 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1834 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1835
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001836Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001837-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001838
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001839- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1840
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001841Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001842-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001843
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001844- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1845 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1846 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1847 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1848 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1849 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1850
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001851- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1852
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001853- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1854
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001855- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1856
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001857- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1858 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1859 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1860
1861- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1862
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001863Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001864-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001865
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001866- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1867 off a search on Google.
1868
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001869Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001870-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001871
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001872- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1873 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1874 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1875 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1876 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1877 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1878 other platforms should do likewise.
1879
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001880- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1881 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1882 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1883
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001884C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001885-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001886
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001887- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1888 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1889 producing key-value pairs.
1890
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001891- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001892 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001893 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1894 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1895 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1896 previously went unchallenged.
1897
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001898New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001899-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001900
1901Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001902-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001903
1904Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001905-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001906
1907Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001908----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001909
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001910- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1911 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001912
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001913- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1914 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1915 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1916 home.
1917
1918
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001919What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001920===========================
1921
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001922*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1923
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001924Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001925--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001926
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001927- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1928 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001929
1930 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001931 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001932
1933 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1934 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001935 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001936 This needs to be documented.
1937
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001938- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1939 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1940
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001941- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1942 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1943 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1944
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001945- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1946 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1947
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001948- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1949 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1950 class forbids it).
1951
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001952- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1953 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1954 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1955
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001956- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1957
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001958Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001959-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001960
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001961- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1962 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001963 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001964
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001965- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1966 (like 1 + '').
1967
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001968Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001969-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001970
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001971- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1972 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1973 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1974 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001975 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001976 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1977
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001978- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1979 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1980 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1981 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1982
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001983- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1984 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001985 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1986 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1987 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001988
1989- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1990 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001991
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001992- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1993 bytes on its input.
1994
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001995Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001996-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001997
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001998- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001999 convenience function.
2000
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002001- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2002 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2003 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002004 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2005 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2006 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2007 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2008 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2009 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002010
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002011- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2012 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2013 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2014 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2015
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002016- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2017 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2018 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2019
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002020- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2021 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2022 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2023 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2024
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002025- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2026 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002027 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002028 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2029 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2030 new -l and -e options.
2031
2032- statcache is now deprecated.
2033
2034- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2035 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002036 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002037 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2038 time properly taken into account.
2039
2040- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2041 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2042 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2043 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2044
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002045Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002046-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002047
2048Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002049-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002050
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002051- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2052 is built with libdb3 if available.
2053
2054- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2055
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002056C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002057-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002058
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002059- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2060 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2061 PySequence_Size().
2062
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002063- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2064
2065- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2066 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2067 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2068
2069- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2070 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2071
2072- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2073 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2074
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002075New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002076-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002077
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002078- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2079 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2080
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002081- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2082 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2083
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002084- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2085
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002086Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002087-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002088
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002089- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2090 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2091
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002092Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002093-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002094
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002095Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002096----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002097
2098- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2099 removed completely in the next release.
2100
2101- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2102 OSX.
2103
2104- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2105 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2106
2107- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2108
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002109
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002110What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002111===========================
2112
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002113*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2114
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002115Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002116--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002117
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002118- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002119 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002120 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002121 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2122 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002123 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2124 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002125 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2126 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002127
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002128- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2129 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2130
2131- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2132 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2133
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002134Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002135-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002136
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002137- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2138 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2139 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2140 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2141 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2142 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2143 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2144 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2145
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002146- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2147 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2148 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2149 example).
2150
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002151- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002152 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002153 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002154 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002155
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002156- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2157 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2158 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002159 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002160
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002161- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2162 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2163 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2164 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2165 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2166 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2167
2168 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2169
2170 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2171
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002172Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002173-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002174
2175- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2176
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002177- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2178
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002179- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2180 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002181
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002182- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2183 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2184 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2185 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2186 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2187 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002188 attributes.
2189
2190- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2191 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2192 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002193
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002194- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2195 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2196 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002197
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002198- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2199 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2200 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002201 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
2202 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
2203
2204- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
2205 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002206
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002207Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002208-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002209
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002210- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2211 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2212
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002213- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2214 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2215 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2216 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2217
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002218- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2219 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2220 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2221 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2222
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002223 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2224 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2225 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2226 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2227 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2228 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2229 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2230 without losing information).
2231
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002232- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002233 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2234 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2235 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2236 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2237 module).
2238
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002239 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002240 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2241 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2242 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2243 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002244
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002245- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002246 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2247 encoding.
2248
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002249- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2250 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2251
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002252- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002253 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2254
2255- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2256 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2257 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2258 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2259
2260- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2261
2262- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2263 ON, and OFF.
2264
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002265- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2266 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2267
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002268Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002269-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002270
2271- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2272 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2273 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002274
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002275- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2276 been added: -X and -E.
2277
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002278Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002279-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002280
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002281- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2282 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2283
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002284C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002285-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002286
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002287- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2288 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2289 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2290 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2291 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2292
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002293- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2294 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2295 as long) arguments.
2296
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002297- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2298 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2299 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2300 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2301 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2302 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2303
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002304- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2305 input.
2306
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002307New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002308-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002309
2310Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002311-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002312
2313Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002314-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002315
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002316- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2317 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2318 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2319
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002320- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2321 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2322 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002323 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002324
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002325 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2326 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2327 import signal
2328 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002329
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002330 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002331 while 1:
2332 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002333 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002334 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2335 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2336 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2337 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002338
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002339
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002340What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2341===========================
2342
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002343*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2344
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002345Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002346--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002347
2348- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2349 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2350 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2351
2352- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2353 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2354 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2355 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2356 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2357 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2358 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002359
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002360- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002361 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002362 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2363 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2364 associate a docstring with a property.
2365
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002366- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2367 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2368 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2369 other built-in object types.
2370
2371- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2372 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2373 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2374 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2375 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2376
2377- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2378 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2379
2380- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2381 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002382 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002383 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2384 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2385 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2386 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2387 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2388
2389- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2390 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2391 class.
2392
2393- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2394 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2395 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2396 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2397
2398- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2399 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2400 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2401 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2402
2403- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2404 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2405
2406- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2407 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2408 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2409 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2410 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002411 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002412 with the same value as s.
2413
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002414- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2415
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002416Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002417----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002418
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002419- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2420
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002421- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2422 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2423 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2424 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2425 objects.
2426
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002427- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2428 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002429 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2430 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2431
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002432- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2433 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2434 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2435
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002436Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002437-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002438
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002439- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2440 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2441 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2442 by the instances.
2443
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002444- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2445 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2446 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2447
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002448- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2449 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2450 before the entire comparison is complete.
2451
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002452- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2453 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2454 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2455
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002456- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2457 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2458 getwriter().
2459
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002460- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2461 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2462
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002463- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002464 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2465 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2466
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002467- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2468 iterable object.
2469
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002470- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2471 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002472
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002473- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2474 authentication.
2475
2476- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2477 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002478
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002479- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002480 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2481 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2482 a sample driver.)
2483
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002484Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002485-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002486
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002487- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2488 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2489 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2490 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2491 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2492 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2493 kernel has large file support.
2494
2495- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2496 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2497 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2498 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2499 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2500
2501- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2502 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2503 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2504
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002505C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002506-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002507
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002508- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2509 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2510
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002511New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002512-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002513
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002514- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2515 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2516
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002517Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002518-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002519
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002520- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2521 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2522 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2523 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2524 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2525
2526- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2527 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2528 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2529 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2530
2531- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2532 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2533
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002534Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002535-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002536
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002537- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002538 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2539 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002540
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002541
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002542What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2543===========================
2544
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002545*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2546
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002547Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002548----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002549
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002550- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2551 big to represent as a C double.
2552
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002553- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2554 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2555 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2556 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2557 restriction).
2558
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002559- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2560 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2561 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2562 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2563 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2564
2565 >>> dir([])
2566 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2567 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2568 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2569 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2570 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2571 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2572 'reverse', 'sort']
2573
2574 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2575
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002576- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002577 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2578 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2579 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2580 OverflowError exception.
2581
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002582- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002583 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002584 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2585 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2586 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2587 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2588 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002589 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002590 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2591 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2592
2593 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2594 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2595 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2596 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002597
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002598- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002599 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2600 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2601 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2602 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2603 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2604 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2605 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2606 once it is created.
2607
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002608- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2609 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2610 (key, value) pairs.
2611
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002612- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002613 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2614 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2615
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002616- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2617 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2618 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2619 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2620 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002621
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002622- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002623 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2624 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2625
2626 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2627
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002628- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002629 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2630
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002631Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002632-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002633
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002634- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002635 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2636 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002637
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002638- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2639 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2640 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2641 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2642 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2643 in this area anymore).
2644
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002645- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2646 threading.Timer.
2647
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002648- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2649 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2650
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002651- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002652 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2653
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002654- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002655 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2656 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2657 converted to Python longs.
2658
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002659- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002660 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2661
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002662- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2663 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2664 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2665
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002666Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002667-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002668
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002669- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2670 division operators as per PEP 238.
2671
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002672Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002673-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002674
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002675- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2676 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2677 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2678 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2679
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002680C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002681-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002682
2683- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002684
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002685- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2686 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002687 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002688
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002689 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2690 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002691 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002692 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002693
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002694- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002695 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2696 module:
2697
2698 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002699
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002700 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2701 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002702
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002703 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2704 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002705
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002706 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2707
2708 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2709
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002710- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002711 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2712 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2713 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002714
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002715New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002716-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002717
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002718- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2719 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2720 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2721 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2722 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002723
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002724Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002725-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002726
2727Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002728-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002729
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002730- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2731 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2732 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2733 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002734 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2735 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2736 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2737 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2738 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002739
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002740- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002741 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2742
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002743
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002744What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2745===========================
2746
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002747*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2748
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002749Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002750-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002751
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002752- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2753 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2754
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002755- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2756 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2757 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002758
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002759- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2760 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2761 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2762 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002763
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002764- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2765
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002766- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002767
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002768Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002769-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002770
2771- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002772 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002773 the module docstring for details.
2774
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002775Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002776-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002777
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002778- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002779 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2780 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2781 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002782
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002783- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2784 Nick Mathewson.
2785
2786Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002787----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002788
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002789- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2790 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2791 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2792 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2793 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2794 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2795 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2796 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2797
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002798- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2799 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2800 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2801 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2802
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002803- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2804 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2805 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2806 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2807 come a long way).
2808
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002809- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2810 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2811 write filters for these warnings).
2812
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002813- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2814 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2815 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2816 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2817 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2818
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002819- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2820 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2821 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2822 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2823 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2824 older distribution.
2825
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002826Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002827-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002828
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002829- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2830 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002831 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002832
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002833- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2834 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2835 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2836
2837- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2838
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002839- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2840
2841- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2842
2843- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2844
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002845- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002846
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002847- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2848
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002849New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002850-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002851
2852C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002853-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002854
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002855- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2856 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2857 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2858 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2859 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2860 against buffer overruns.
2861
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002862- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002863 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2864 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002865 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2866 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2867 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2868
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002869- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2870 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2871 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2872 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2873 deprecated.
2874
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002875Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002876-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002877
2878- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2879 relevant is found.
2880
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002881
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002882What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002883===========================
2884
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002885*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2886
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002887Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002888----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002889
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002890- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2891 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2892 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2893 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2894 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2895 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2896 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2897 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002898 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002899 repaired.
2900
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002901- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002902 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002903 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2904 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2905 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2906 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2907 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2908 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2909 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2910 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2911
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002912- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2913 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2914 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2915 leading BMO character).
2916
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002917- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2918 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2919 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2920
2921 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2922 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2923 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002924
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002925 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2926 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2927 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2928 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2929 for various simple to use conversions.
2930
2931 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2932 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2933
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002934 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2935 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2936 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2937 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2938 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2939 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2940 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2941 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2942 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2943 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2944 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2945 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2946 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2947 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2948 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002949
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002950- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2951 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2952 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002953 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002954 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002955
2956 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002957 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2958 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2959 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2960 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2961 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002962 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2963 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002964
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002965 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2966 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2967 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002968 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002969
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002970- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2971 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2972 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2973 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2974 floating arithmetic,
2975
2976 x = 9007199254740992.0
2977 print long(x)
2978
2979 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2980 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2981 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2982 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2983 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2984 functions are of good quality).
2985
2986 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2987 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2988 algorithms to break.
2989
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002990- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2991 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2992 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2993 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2994 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2995 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2996 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2997 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2998 order.
2999
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003000- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3001 operation along the most common code paths.
3002
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003003- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3004 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3005
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003006- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3007 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3008 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3009 {}.update(UserDict())
3010
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003011- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3012 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3013 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3014 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3015 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3016 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3017 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3018 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3019
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003020- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003021 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003022
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003023 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003024 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3025 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003026 join() method of strings
3027 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003028 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3029 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003030 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003031 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003032
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003033- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3034 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3035
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003036- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3037 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3038
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003039- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3040 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3041 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3042 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3043
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003044- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3045 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003046 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003047 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3048 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003049
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003050- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3051
3052
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003053Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003054-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003055
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003056- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003057 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003058 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3059 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3060
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003061- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3062 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3063
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003064- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3065 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3066 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3067 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3068
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003069- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3070 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3071 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3072
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003073- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3074
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003075- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3076
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003077- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3078 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3079 that are still imported into string.py).
3080
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003081- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3082
3083- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3084 Now it does.
3085
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003086- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3087
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003088- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3089 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3090 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3091 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3092 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003093 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3094 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003095
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003096- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3097 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3098 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3099 'help(object)'.
3100
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003101Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003102-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003103
3104- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003105 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003106 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3107 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3108
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003109- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003110 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3111 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003112
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003113C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003114-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003115
3116- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3117 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003118
3119----
3120
3121**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**