blob: 184c15cecde4507363b44fc29d02a3fe524fec6e [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
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +000015- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
16 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
17
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +000018- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
19 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
20 modified the list.
21
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +000022- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
23 functions is now writable.
24
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +000025- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
26 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
27 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
28 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
29
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000030- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
31 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
32 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
33 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
34 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +000035
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +000036- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
37 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
38
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000039Extension modules
40-----------------
41
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +000042- Added socket.socketpair().
43
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000044Library
45-------
46
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +000047- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
48
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +000049- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
50
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +000051- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
52 Percivall.
53
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +000054- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
55 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
56
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +000057- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
58 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
59 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
60 than creating a new one.
61
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +000062- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
63 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
64 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
65 and exponent.
66
67- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
68
69- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
70 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
71 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
72
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +000073- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
74 to the readline module.
75
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +000076- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +000077 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
78 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +000079
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +000080- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
81 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
82 contains symlinks.
83
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +000084- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
85 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
86
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +000087- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
88 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
89 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
90
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000091- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
92 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
93 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
94 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
95 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
96 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
97 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
98 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
99 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
100 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
101 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
102 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
103 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
104
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000105- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
106
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000107Tools/Demos
108-----------
109
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000110- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
111 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
112
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000113- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
114
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000115Build
116-----
117
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000118- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
119 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
120
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000121- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
122 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
123
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000124- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
125 GNU/k*BSD systems.
126
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000127C API
128-----
129
130Documentation
131-------------
132
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000133- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if it contains
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000134symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment since 1992, but is now in
135the library reference as well.
136
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000137New platforms
138-------------
139
140Tests
141-----
142
143Windows
144-------
145
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000146- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
147 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
148 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
149 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
150 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
151 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
152 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
153 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
154 the problem.
155
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000156Mac
157---
158
159
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000160What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
161=================================
162
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000163*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000164
165Core and builtins
166-----------------
167
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000168- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
169 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
170 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
171 sensitive code.
172
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000173- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
174 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
175 @staticmethod
176 def foo(bar):
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000177 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000178
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000179- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
180 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
181 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
182 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
183 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
184 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
185 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
186 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
187 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
188 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
189 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
190
191 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
192 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
193 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
194 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
195 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
196 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
197 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
198
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000199- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
200 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
201
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000202- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000203 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000204
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000205- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000206 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000207 which was missing for no apparent reason.
208
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000209- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000210 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
211 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
212
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000213- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
214 types that support garbage collection.
215
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000216- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
217
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000218- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
219 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
220 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
221 Jython.
222
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000223- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
224
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000225- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
226 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
227
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000228- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
229 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
230 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000231
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000232- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
233 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
234 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
235
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000236Extension modules
237-----------------
238
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000239- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
240
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000241Library
242-------
243
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000244- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
245 TIS-620
246
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000247- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
248 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
249 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
250 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
251 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
252 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
253 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
254 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
255 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
256 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
257
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000258- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
259
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000260- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
261 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
262 same as when the argument is omitted).
263 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
264
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000265- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
266
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000267- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
268 schemes are offered.
269
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000270- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
271
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000272- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
273 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
274 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
275
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000276- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
277
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000278- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
279 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
280
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000281- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
282 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
283 when dummy_threading is being used.
284
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000285- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
286 from a tarfile.
287
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000288- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000289 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000290
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000291- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
292 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
293 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
294 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
295
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000296- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
297 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
298
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000299- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
300 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
301 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
302 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
303 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
304 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
305 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
306 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
307 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
308 by some other method in progress).
309
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000310- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
311 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
312 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000313
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000314- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
315
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000316- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
317 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
318 AM Kuchling.
319
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000320- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
321 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
322 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
323
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000324- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
325 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
326 instead of unsigned.
327
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000328- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000329 no longer part of the public API.
330
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000331- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
332 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
333 string methods of the same name).
334
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000335- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000336 SF patch 945642.
337
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000338- doctest unittest integration improvements:
339
340 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
341
342 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
343 DocTestSuites.
344
345- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
346 that provide thread-local data.
347
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000348- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
349 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
350
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000351- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
352
353- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
354 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
355 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
356
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000357- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
358
359 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
360 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
361 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000362
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000363 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
364 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
365 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
366 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
367
368 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
369 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
370
371 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
372 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
373 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
374 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
375
376 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
377 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
378 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
379 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
380 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
381
382 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
383 wrapping help output.
384
385 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
386 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
387 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000388
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000389C API
390-----
391
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000392- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
393 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
394 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
395 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
396 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
397 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
398 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
399 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
400 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
401 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
402 its visible semantics have not changed.
403
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000404- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
405 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
406
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000407Documentation
408-------------
409
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000410- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000411
412 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000413 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000414
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000415 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000416
417 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
418
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000419- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000420
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000421Tests
422-----
423
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000424- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000425 platforms that use the Makefile.
426
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000427- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
428 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
429 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
430
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000431
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000432What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
433=================================
434
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000435*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000436
437Core and builtins
438-----------------
439
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000440- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
441 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
442 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
443 objects now (one object instead of three).
444
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000445- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
446 Windows DLLs.
447
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000448- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
449 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000450
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000451- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
452 a new .pyc magic.
453
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000454- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
455 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
456 be there.
457
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000458- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
459 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
460 the LC_NUMERIC category.
461
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000462- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
463 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
464 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
465
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000466- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
467
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000468- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
469 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
470 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000471
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000472- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
473 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
474
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000475- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
476
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000477- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000478 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000479
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000480- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
481
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000482- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
483
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000484- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
485 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
486
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000487- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
488 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
489 Fixes bug #858016 .
490
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000491- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
492 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
493 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
494
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000495- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
496 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
497 improves their performance (about 35%).
498
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000499- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
500 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
501 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
502
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000503- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
504 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
505 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
506 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
507
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000508- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
509 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
510 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
511 length is not known).
512
513- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
514 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000515 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
516 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000517 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
518
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000519- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
520 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
521
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000522- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
523 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
524 keyword arguments.
525
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000526- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
527 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
528 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
529
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000530- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
531 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
532 cases.
533
534- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
535 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
536 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
537 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
538 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
539 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
540 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
541 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
542 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
543 a release build.
544
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000545- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
546 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
547
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000548- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000549 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000550
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000551- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
552 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
553 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
554 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
555 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
556 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
557 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
558 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
559 destroyed.
560
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000561- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
562 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
563 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
564 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
565 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
566 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
567 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
568 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
569
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000570- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
571 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
572 character other than a space.
573
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000574- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
575 by the function object or by the method object, the function
576 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
577 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
578 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
579 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
580 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
581 attributes with the same name.
582
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000583- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
584 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
585 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
586 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
587 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
588 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
589 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
590 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
591 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
592 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
593 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
594 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
595 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
596 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000597
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000598- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
599 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
600 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
601 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
602 This has been repaired.
603
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000604- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
605
606- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
607
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000608- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
609 over a sequence.
610
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000611- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000612 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000613
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000614- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
615
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000616- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
617 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
618 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
619 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
620 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
621 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
622 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
623 records with equal keys is unchanged).
624
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000625- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
626 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
627 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
628
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000629- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
630 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
631 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
632 freelist.
633
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000634- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
635 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
636
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000637- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
638 number.
639
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000640- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
641 a TypeError exception.
642
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000643- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
644 820195.
645
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000646- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
647 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
648 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
649
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000650- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000651 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
652 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000653
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000654- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
655 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
656 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
657
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000658- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
659 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000660 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000661
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000662- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000663 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
664 the first call.
665
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000666
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000667Extension modules
668-----------------
669
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000670- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
671 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
672
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000673- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
674 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
675 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
676 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
677 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
678 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
679 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000680
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000681- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
682
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000683- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
684
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000685- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
686 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
687
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000688- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
689 fewer false positives.
690
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000691- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
692 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
693
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000694- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000695 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
696
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000697- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000698 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000699 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
700 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
701 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000702
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000703- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
704 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
705 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
706 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
707
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000708- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
709 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
710 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
711 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
712 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
713 #897625.
714
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000715- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
716 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
717
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000718- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
719 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
720 and pops on either side of the deque.
721
722- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
723 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
724
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000725- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
726 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
727 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
728 other functions that expect a function argument.
729
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000730- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
731
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000732- os.getsid was added.
733
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000734- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
735 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
736 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
737
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000738- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
739
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000740- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
741
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000742- readline.clear_history was added.
743
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000744- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
745
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000746- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
747
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000748- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
749
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000750- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
751
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000752- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
753
754- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
755
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000756- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
757
758- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
759
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000760- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
761 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
762 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
763
764- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
765 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
766 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
767 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
768 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
769 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
770 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
771
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000772- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
773 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
774 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
775 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000776
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000777- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000778 iterators from a single iterable.
779
780- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
781 of raising a TypeError exception.
782
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000783- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
784 as parameter.
785
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000786Library
787-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000788
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000789- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
790 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
791 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000792
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000793- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
794 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
795 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000796
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000797- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000798
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000799- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
800 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000801
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000802- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
803 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
804
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000805- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
806
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000807- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000808 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000809
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000810- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
811 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
812
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000813- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
814
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000815- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
816 on cygwin and mingw32.
817
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000818- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
819
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000820- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
821 module.
822
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000823- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
824 installation scheme for all platforms.
825
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000826- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000827 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000828
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000829- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
830 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
831 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
832
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000833- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
834 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
835 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
836
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000837- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
838
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000839- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
840
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000841- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
842 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
843
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000844- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
845 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
846 type pattern with the same value exists.
847
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000848- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
849 when run from the command prompt).
850
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000851- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
852 not taken into consideration when caching value.
853
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000854- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
855 default sort).
856
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000857- Added global runctx function to profile module
858
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000859- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
860
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000861- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
862
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000863- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
864
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000865- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000866 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
867 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
868 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
869 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
870 accordingly.
871
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000872- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
873 decoding standards.
874
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000875- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
876 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
877 called for all requests.
878
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000879- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
880 they are passed to the compiler.
881
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000882- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
883 indent, width and depth.
884
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000885- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
886 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
887
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000888- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
889 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
890
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000891- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
892
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000893- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
894
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000895- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
896
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000897- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
898 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
899
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000900- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000901 for better performance.
902
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000903- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000904
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000905- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
906 a string).
907
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000908- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
909
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000910- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
911
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000912- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
913
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000914- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
915
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000916- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
917 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
918 list of fieldnames.
919
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000920- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
921 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
922
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000923- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
924
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000925- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
926 empty lists.
927
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000928- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
929 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
930 and shelves.
931
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000932- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
933 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
934
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000935- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000936 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
937 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000938
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000939- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
940 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000941 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000942
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000943- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000944 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
945 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
946
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000947- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
948 and removed in Py2.4.
949
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000950- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
951
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000952- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
953
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000954Tools/Demos
955-----------
956
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000957- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
958 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
959
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000960- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
961
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000962- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
963 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
964 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
965 destination in situations where both files are given.
966
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000967- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
968 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
969 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
970 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
971
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000972- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
973
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000974- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
975 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
976 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
977 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
978 now.
979
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000980- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
981 in effect
982
983- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
984 C-c C-h
985
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000986- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
987 -d option was given.
988
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000989Build
990-----
991
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000992- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
993 build under OS X.
994
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000995- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
996 --enable-profiling.
997
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000998- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
999 is configured --with-tsc.
1000
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001001- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1002 on AMD64.
1003
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001004- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1005 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1006
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001007- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1008 removed.
1009
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001010- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1011 supported (see PEP 11).
1012
1013- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1014
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001015- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1016
1017- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1018 (see PEP 11).
1019
1020- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1021 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1022
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001023C API
1024-----
1025
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001026- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1027 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1028 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1029
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001030- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1031 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1032 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1033 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1034
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001035- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1036 generator objects.
1037
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001038- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1039 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001040 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1041 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001042
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001043- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1044 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1045
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001046- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1047 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1048 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1049 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1050 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1051
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001052- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1053 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1054 about 10% faster.
1055
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001056- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1057 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1058
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001059- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1060 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1061 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1062 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1063
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001064Windows
1065-------
1066
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001067- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1068 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1069 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1070 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1071
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001072- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1073 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1074 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1075
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001076
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001077What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1078===============================
1079
1080*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1081
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001082IDLE
1083----
1084
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001085- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1086 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1087 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1088 context-menu actions.
1089
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001090- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1091 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1092 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1093 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1094 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1095 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1096 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1097 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1098 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1099
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001100
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001101What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1102=============================================
1103
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001104*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001105
1106Core and builtins
1107-----------------
1108
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001109- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001110 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001111 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1112
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001113Extension modules
1114-----------------
1115
1116- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1117 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1118 than once. This has been fixed.
1119
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001120- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1121 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1122 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1123 call.
1124
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001125- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1126
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001127Library
1128-------
1129
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001130- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1131 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1132
1133- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1134 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1135 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1136 restored.
1137
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001138IDLE
1139----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001140
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001141- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001142
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001143Build
1144-----
1145
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001146- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1147 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1148
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001149C API
1150-----
1151
1152Windows
1153-------
1154
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001155- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1156 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1157
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001158- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1159
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001160Mac
1161---
1162
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001163- Various fixes to pimp.
1164
1165- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1166
1167- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1168 more problems than it solves.
1169
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001170
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001171What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1172=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001173
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001174*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1175
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001176Core and builtins
1177-----------------
1178
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001179- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1180 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1181
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001182- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1183 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001184 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001185
1186- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1187 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1188 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001189 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001190
1191- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1192 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001193
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001194- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1195 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1196 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1197
1198- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001199 770247.
1200
1201- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001202
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001203Extension modules
1204-----------------
1205
1206- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1207 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1208
1209- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1210
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001211- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1212
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001213- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1214 contained within the _strptime module.
1215
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001216- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1217 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1218
1219- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001220 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1221
1222- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1223 the find_class attribute, if present.
1224
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001225- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001226
1227 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1228 (SF bug 763298).
1229
1230 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001231 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1232 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1233 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001234
1235 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1236
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001237Library
1238-------
1239
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001240- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1241
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001242- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1243 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1244 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1245 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1246 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1247 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1248 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1249 or Tester().
1250
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001251- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1252 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1253 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1254 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1255 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1256 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1257 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1258 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1259 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001260
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001261 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001262
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001263- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1264 weren't before was an oversight.
1265
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001266- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1267 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1268
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001269- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1270 when there are no lines.
1271
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001272- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1273 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1274
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001275- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1276 to child processes.
1277
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001278- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1279
1280- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1281
1282- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1283 xmlrpclib.
1284
1285- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1286 responses.
1287
1288- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1289 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1290
1291- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1292 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1293 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1294
1295- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1296 used as patterns.
1297
1298- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1299 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1300 than Tk 8.3.
1301
1302- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1303
1304- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001305
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001306Tools/Demos
1307-----------
1308
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001309- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1310
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001311- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1312
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001313- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001314
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001315Build
1316-----
1317
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001318- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1319
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001320- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1321
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001322- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1323 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001324
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001325- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1326 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1327 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001328
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001329C API
1330-----
1331
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001332- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1333 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1334
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001335Windows
1336-------
1337
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001338- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1339 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1340 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1341 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1342 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1343 Python exception ::
1344
1345 thread.error: can't start new thread
1346
1347 is raised now.
1348
1349- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1350 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1351 instead of from DLL teardown.
1352
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001353Mac
1354---
1355
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001356- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001357 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001358 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1359 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1360 the executable in the bundle.
1361
1362- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001363
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001364- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1365
1366- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1367 on Panther.
1368
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001369What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1370================================
1371
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001372*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001373
1374Core and builtins
1375-----------------
1376
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001377- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1378 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1379 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1380 with the -i option.
1381
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001382- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1383 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1384
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001385- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1386 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1387
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001388- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1389 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1390 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1391 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1392 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1393 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1394 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1395 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1396 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1397 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1398 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1399 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1400 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001401
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001402- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1403 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1404 embedded in a lambda expression.
1405
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001406- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1407 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1408 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1409 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1410 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1411
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001412- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1413 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1414 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1415
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001416- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1417 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1418
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001419- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1420 It's writable again.
1421
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001422- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1423 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1424 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001425 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001426
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001427- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1428 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1429 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1430
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001431Extension modules
1432-----------------
1433
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001434- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1435 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1436
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001437- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1438 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1439 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1440 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1441
1442- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1443 collection.
1444
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001445- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1446 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1447 unique within a single program run.
1448
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001449- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1450 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1451
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001452- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1453 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1454
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001455- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1456 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001457
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001458- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1459
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001460- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1461 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1462
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001463- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1464 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1465 for many BSD-derived systems.
1466
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001467
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001468Library
1469-------
1470
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001471- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1472 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1473 primary ones:
1474
1475 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1476 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1477 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1478
1479 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1480 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1481 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1482 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1483 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1484 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1485
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001486- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1487 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1488 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1489 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1490 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1491 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1492 argument.
1493
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001494- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1495 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1496 in the archive.
1497
1498- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1499 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1500
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001501- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1502 569574).
1503
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001504- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1505 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1506 no more.
1507
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001508- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1509 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1510 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1511 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1512 code coverage.
1513
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001514- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1515 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1516 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001517 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1518 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001519
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001520- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1521 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1522 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001523 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001524
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001525- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1526
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001527- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1528 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1529 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1530 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1531
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001532- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1533 handling.
1534
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001535- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1536 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1537
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001538- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1539 in socket.py.
1540
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001541- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1542
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001543- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1544 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1545 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1546 opener with proxy support.
1547
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001548- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1549
1550- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1551
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001552Tools/Demos
1553-----------
1554
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001555- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1556
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001557- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1558
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001559- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1560 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001561
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001562- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1563 files.
1564
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001565Build
1566-----
1567
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001568- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001569 different root directory.
1570
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001571C API
1572-----
1573
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001574- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1575 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1576 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1577 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1578 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1579 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1580 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1581 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1582 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1583 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1584
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001585- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1586 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1587 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1588 from Python.
1589
1590
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001591New platforms
1592-------------
1593
1594None this time.
1595
1596Tests
1597-----
1598
1599- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1600 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1601
1602Windows
1603-------
1604
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001605- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1606
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001607- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1608 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1609 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1610 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1611 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1612 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1613 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1614 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1615 that's what it's for.
1616
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001617Mac
1618---
1619
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001620- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1621 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1622 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1623 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001624- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1625 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1626- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001627
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001628SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1629------------------------------------
1630
1631430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1632598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1633622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1634661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1635683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1636697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1637713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1638724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1639727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1640729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1641730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1642731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1643732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1644733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1645735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1646740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1647744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1648745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1649747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1650749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1651751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1652753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1653755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1654757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1655760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1656
1657
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001658What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1659================================
1660
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001661*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001662
1663Core and builtins
1664-----------------
1665
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001666- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1667 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1668
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001669- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1670 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1671 and cannot be strings).
1672
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001673- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1674 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1675 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1676 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1677
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001678- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1679 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1680 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1681 Python itself.
1682
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001683- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1684 the referenced object, if it has one.
1685
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001686- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1687 the thread started at
1688 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1689
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001690- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1691 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1692 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1693 placed on a list index.
1694
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001695- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1696 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1697 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1698 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1699
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001700- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1701 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1702 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1703 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1704 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1705 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1706 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1707
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001708- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1709 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1710 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1711 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1712 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1713
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001714- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1715 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001716
1717- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1718 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1719 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1720 #693195.)
1721
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001722- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1723 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001724
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001725- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001726 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001727 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1728 interpreter executions, would fail.
1729
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001730- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001731 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001732 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001733
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001734Extension modules
1735-----------------
1736
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001737- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1738 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1739 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1740 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1741
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001742- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1743 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1744
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001745- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1746 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1747 and Greg Chapman.)
1748
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001749- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1750 recursively.
1751
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001752- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001753 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1754 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1755 leaks.
1756
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001757- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1758
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001759- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1760 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1761 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1762 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1763 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1764 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1765 #705836.
1766
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001767- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001768 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1769
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001770- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1771 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1772 See SF bug #692416.
1773
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001774- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1775 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1776
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001777- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1778 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1779 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001780
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001781- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001782 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1783 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1784
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001785- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1786 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1787 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1788 timeouts to work properly.
1789
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001790Library
1791-------
1792
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001793- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1794 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1795 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1796 future release.
1797
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001798- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1799 for querying platform dependent features.
1800
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001801- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001802
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001803- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1804 pickle protocol versions.
1805
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001806- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1807 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1808 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1809
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001810- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1811
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001812- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1813 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1814 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1815 modules.
1816
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001817- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1818 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1819 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1820
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001821- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1822 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1823
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001824- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1825 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1826 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1827
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001828- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001829 MS Office extensions.
1830
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001831- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1832 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1833
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001834- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1835 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1836
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001837- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1838 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1839 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1840 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1841 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1842 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1843
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001844- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1845 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1846 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001847
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001848- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1849 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1850 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1851
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001852- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1853
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001854- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1855 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1856 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1857
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001858Tools/Demos
1859-----------
1860
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001861- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1862 See the module docstring for details.
1863
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001864Build
1865-----
1866
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001867- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1868 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001869
1870C API
1871-----
1872
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001873- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1874
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001875- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1876 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1877 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1878
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001879- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1880 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001881
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001882 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1883 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1884 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001885
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001886- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001887 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1888
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001889- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1890 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1891 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001892
1893New platforms
1894-------------
1895
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001896None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001897
1898Tests
1899-----
1900
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001901- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1902 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001903
1904Windows
1905-------
1906
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001907- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1908 function.
1909
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001910- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1911 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001912
1913Mac
1914---
1915
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001916- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1917 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001918
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001919- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1920 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001921
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001922- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1923 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1924 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001925
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001926- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001927 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1928 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001929
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001930- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1931 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001932
1933
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001934What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1935=================================
1936
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001937*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001938
1939Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001940-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001941
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001942- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1943 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1944 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1945
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001946- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1947 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1948 (SF patch #664376.)
1949
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001950- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1951 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1952 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1953 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1954 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1955 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001956 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001957
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001958- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1959 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1960 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1961 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001962 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001963
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001964- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1965 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1966 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1967 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1968 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1969 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1970 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1971 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1972 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1973 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1974 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1975
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001976- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1977 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1978 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1979 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1980 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1981 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1982
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001983- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1984 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1985
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001986- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1987 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1988 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1989 case.)
1990
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001991- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1992 passed as unicode strings.
1993
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001994- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1995 See SF bug #683467.
1996
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001997- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1998 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1999
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002000- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2001
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002002- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2003
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002004- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2005 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2006 arguments.
2007
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002008- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2009 See SF bug #667147.
2010
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002011- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002012 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002013 See SF bug #676155.
2014
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002015- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002016 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002017 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2018 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2019 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2020 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2021 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2022 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002023
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002024Extension modules
2025-----------------
2026
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002027- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2028 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2029 tp_as_number pointer.
2030
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002031- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2032 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2033 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2034 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2035 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2036
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002037- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2038
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002039- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2040
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002041- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002042 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002043 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2044 patch #678531.)
2045
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002046- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2047 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2048
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002049- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2050 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2051
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002052- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2053
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002054- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2055 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2056 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2057
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002058- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2059
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002060- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2061 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2062
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002063- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002064
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002065- datetime changes:
2066
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002067 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2068
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002069 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2070 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2071 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2072 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2073 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2074 now.
2075
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002076 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002077 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2078 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002079
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002080 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002081 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002082 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2083 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2084 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2085 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002086
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002087 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2088 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2089 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002090 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2091
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002092 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2093 by a later example coded by Guido.
2094
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002095 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002096 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2097 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2098 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002099 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2100 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2101
2102 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2103 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2104 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2105 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2106 tzinfo subclass instance.
2107
2108 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2109 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2110 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2111 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2112 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2113 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2114 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2115 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002116
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002117 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2118 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2119 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2120 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2121 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002122 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2123
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002124 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002125
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002126 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2127 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2128 as a naive datetime object.
2129
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002130 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2131 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2132 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2133
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002134 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2135 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2136 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2137 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2138 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2139 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2140 comparison.
2141
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002142 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2143 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2144 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2145 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002146 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002147
2148 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002149
2150 and ::
2151
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002152 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2153
2154 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2155 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2156 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2157 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2158
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002159 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2160 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2161 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2162 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2163 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2164
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002165 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2166 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002167 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2168 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002169
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002170Library
2171-------
2172
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002173- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2174 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2175
2176- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2177 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2178 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2179 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2180 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2181 See PEP 307 for details.
2182
2183- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2184 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2185
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002186- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2187 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002188 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002189 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2190 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002191 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002192
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002193- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2194 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2195
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002196- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2197 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2198 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2199
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002200- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2201
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002202- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2203 exception.
2204
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002205- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2206 class.
2207
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002208- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2209 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2210 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2211
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002212- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2213 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2214
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002215- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002216 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2217 See SF bug #659228.
2218
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002219- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2220 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2221 See SF patch #651082.
2222
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002223- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002224
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002225- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2226 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2227
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002228- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002229 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002230
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002231- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2232 DOS paths from other platforms.
2233
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002234Tools/Demos
2235-----------
2236
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002237- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2238 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2239 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2240 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2241 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2242 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2243 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2244 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2245 example:
2246
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002247 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2248 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002249
2250 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2251
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002252
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002253Build
2254-----
2255
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002256- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2257 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2258 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002259 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2260
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002261 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2262
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002263- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2264 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2265 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2266 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2267 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2268 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2269 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2270 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2271 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2272
2273- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2274 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2275 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2276 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2277
2278- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2279 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2280
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002281C API
2282-----
2283
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002284- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2285 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002286
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002287- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2288 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2289 tp_as_number pointer.
2290
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002291- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2292 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2293 (SF #681367)
2294
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002295- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2296 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2297 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2298 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002299
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002300Tests
2301-----
2302
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002303- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002304 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2305 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2306 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2307 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2308 pydoc.)
2309
2310- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2311
2312- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002313
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002314Windows
2315-------
2316
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002317- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2318 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2319 time).
2320
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002321- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2322 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2323
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002324- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2325 release without strong cryptography.
2326
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002327- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002328 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002329
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002330- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2331 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2332
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002333Mac
2334---
2335
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002336- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2337 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002338
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002339- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2340 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2341 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002342
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002343- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2344 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002345
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002346- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2347 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2348 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2349 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002350
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002351- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002352 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2353 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2354 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002355
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002356
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002357What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002358=================================
2359
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002360*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002361
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002362Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002363--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002364
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002365- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2366
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002367- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2368 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002369 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002370 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002371 a different meaning than before.
2372
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002373- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002374 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002375 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002376
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002377- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002378 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002379 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002380
2381- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2382 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2383 and deallocation.
2384
2385- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2386 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2387
2388- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2389 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2390 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2391 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2392 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2393
2394- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2395 now detected by the garbage collector.
2396
2397- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2398 [SF bug 519621]
2399
2400- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2401 identifier.
2402
2403- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2404 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2405 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2406 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2407 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2408 [SF bug 563060]
2409
2410- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2411 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2412 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2413 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2414 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2415
2416- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2417 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2418 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2419
2420- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2421
2422- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2423 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2424 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2425 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2426 state of the slots would be lost.)
2427
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002428Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002429-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002430
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002431- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002432 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2433 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2434 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2435 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002436 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2437 Jython 2.1.
2438
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002439- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002440 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002441 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2442 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2443 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2444 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2445 these, see PEP 302.
2446
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002447- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2448 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2449 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2450
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002451- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2452 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2453 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2454
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002455- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2456 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2457 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2458
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002459- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2460 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2461 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2462 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2463 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2464 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2465 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2466 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2467 releases or implementations.
2468
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002469- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002470 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2471 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002472
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002473- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2474 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2475
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002476- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2477 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2478 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2479
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002480- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2481 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2482
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002483- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2484 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002485 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2486 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002487
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002488- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2489 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2490 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2491 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2492 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2493
2494 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2495 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2496 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2497 pattern.
2498
2499 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2500 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2501 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2502 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2503
2504 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2505 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2506 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2507 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2508 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2509 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2510
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002511- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2512 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2513 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2514 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2515 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2516 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2517 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2518 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002519
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002520- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2521 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2522 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2523 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2524 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002525 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2526 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2527 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2528 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2529 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2530 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2531 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002532
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002533- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2534 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2535
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002536- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2537 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2538 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2539 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2540 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2541 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2542 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2543 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2544 to Zack Weinberg!
2545
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002546- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2547 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2548 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2549 type. This has been fixed now.
2550
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002551- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2552 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2553 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2554
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002555- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2556 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2557 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2558 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2559 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2560 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2561 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2562 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002563 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002564
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002565- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2566 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2567 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002568
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002569- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2570 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2571 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2572 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2573 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2574 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2575 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2576 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002577 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002578 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2579 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2580
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002581- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2582 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2583 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2584 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2585 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2586 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2587 this.)
2588
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002589- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2590 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002591 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002592 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002593 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2594 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002595 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2596 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002597
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002598- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2599 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2600 currently running.
2601
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002602- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2603 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2604 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2605 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2606
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002607- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2608 as directory names.
2609
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002610- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2611 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2612
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002613- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2614 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2615
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002616- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002617 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2618 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002619
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002620- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2621 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2622 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2623 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2624 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2625
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002626- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2627 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2628 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2629 removed.
2630
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002631- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2632 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2633 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2634
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002635- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2636 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2637 to __debug__.
2638
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002639- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2640 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2641 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2642
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002643- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2644 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2645 deprecated now.
2646
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002647- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2648 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2649 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002650
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002651- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2652 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2653 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2654 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2655 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002656
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002657- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2658 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2659
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002660- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2661 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2662 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002663 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002664 is backward compatible.
2665
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002666- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2667 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2668 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2669 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2670 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2671
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002672- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2673 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2674 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2675 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2676 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2677 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002678
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002679- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2680 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2681
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002682- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2683 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2684
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002685- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2686 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2687 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2688 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2689 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2690
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002691- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2692 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2693 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2694
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002695- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002696 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2697
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002698- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2699 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2700 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002701
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002702- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2703 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2704
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002705- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2706 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2707 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2708
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002709- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2710
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002711Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002712-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002713
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002714- Added three operators to the operator module:
2715 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2716 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2717 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2718
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002719- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2720
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002721- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2722 archives.
2723
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002724- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2725 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2726 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2727
2728 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2729
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002730- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2731 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2732 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002733 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002734
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002735- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2736 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2737 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2738 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002739 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2740 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2741 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2742 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002743
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002744- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2745 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002746
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002747- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2748
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002749- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2750 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2751
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002752- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2753 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2754 supported.
2755
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002756- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2757
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002758- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2759 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002760
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002761- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2762 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2763
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002764- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2765
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002766- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2767 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2768
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002769- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2770 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2771 functions but callable type objects.
2772
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002773- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002774 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002775 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002776
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002777- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2778 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002779
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002780- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2781 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002782
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002783- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2784 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2785 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2786 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2787
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002788- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2789 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002790
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002791- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2792 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2793 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2794 and __imul__.
2795
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002796- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002797 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2798 is called.
2799
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002800- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2801 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2802 interpreter was compiled.
2803
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002804- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2805 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2806 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002807 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002808 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2809 1, not 2.
2810
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002811- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2812 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2813 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2814 limit.
2815
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002816- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2817 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2818 bug #623464.
2819
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002820- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2821 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2822 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2823 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2824
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002825Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002826-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002827
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002828- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2829
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002830- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2831 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2832 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2833 with Python 2.3a2.
2834
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002835- os.path exposes getctime.
2836
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002837- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002838 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002839 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002840 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002841 unit tests of floating point results.
2842
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002843- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2844 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2845 has been increased.
2846
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002847- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2848 executed.
2849
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002850- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2851 postinstallation script.
2852
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002853- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2854 test the current module.
2855
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002856- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002857 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2858 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2859 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2860 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2861
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002862- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002863 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002864 Ward's Optik package.
2865
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002866- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2867 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2868 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2869 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2870
2871- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2872 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002873 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002874
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002875- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2876 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2877 shelf are binary pickles.
2878
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002879- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2880 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2881
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002882- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2883 modules are iterators now.
2884
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002885- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2886 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2887 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2888 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2889 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2890 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002891
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002892- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2893 with their entity value.
2894
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002895- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2896
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002897- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2898 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002899
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002900- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2901 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002902 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002903
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002904- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2905 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2906 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2907 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2908 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2909 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2910 main():
2911
2912 import locale
2913 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2914
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002915- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2916 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2917
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002918- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2919 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2920 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2921 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2922 to the new standard.
2923
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002924- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2925 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2926 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2927 an extension to the database.
2928
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002929- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2930 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2931 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2932 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002933 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002934
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002935- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002936 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002937
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002938- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2939 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2940 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2941 bounded integers.
2942
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002943- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2944 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2945 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2946 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2947 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2948 in existence.
2949
2950 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2951 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2952 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2953 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2954 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2955 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2956
2957 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2958 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2959 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2960 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2961
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002962- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2963 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2964 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2965
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002966- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2967
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002968- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2969 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2970 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2971 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2972
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002973- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2974 argument.
2975
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002976- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2977 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2978 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2979 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2980 [SF patch 560794].
2981
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002982- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2983 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2984 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002985 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2986 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2987 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002988
2989- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2990 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002991
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002992- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2993 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2994 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2995 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002996
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002997- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2998 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2999 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3000 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3001 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3002
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003003- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003004
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003005- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3006
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003007- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3008 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3009 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3010 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3011 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3012 identical to None.
3013
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003014- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3015 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3016 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3017 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3018 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3019 results now.
3020
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003021- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3022 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3023
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003024- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3025 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3026 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3027 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3028 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3029 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3030 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3031 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3032
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003033- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3034
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003035- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3036 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3037
3038- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3039 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3040 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3041 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3042 and other systems.
3043
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003044- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3045 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3046 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3047 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 +00003048 work well with these.
3049
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003050- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3051
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003052- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003053 connections.
3054
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003055- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3056 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3057 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3058
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003059- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3060 sets
3061
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003062- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3063 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3064 name.
3065
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003066- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3067 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3068 passed in.
3069
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003070- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003071 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003072 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3073 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003074
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003075- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3076
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003077- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3078
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003079- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3080 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3081 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3082
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003083- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3084 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3085 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3086 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003087 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003088
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003089- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003090 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003091 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003092
3093- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3094 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3095 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3096
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003097- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003098 the value of its expression argument.
3099
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003100- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3101 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3102 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3103
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003104- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3105 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3106 skipstone browser was included.
3107
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003108- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3109 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3110
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003111Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003112-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003113
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003114- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3115 names in addition to accepting file names.
3116
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003117- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3118 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3119 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3120 still used and useful.)
3121
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003122- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3123 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3124 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3125 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003126
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003127- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3128 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3129 the generated binary.
3130
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003131Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003132-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003133
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003134- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3135
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003136- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3137 except in the hands of experts.
3138
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003139- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003140 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3141 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3142 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003143
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003144- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3145 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3146 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3147 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3148 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3149 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3150 builds.
3151
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003152- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3153 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3154 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3155 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3156 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3157 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3158 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3159 new type.
3160
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003161- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003162
3163 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3164 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3165 positive infinities.
3166
3167 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3168 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3169 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3170 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3171 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3172 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3173 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3174
3175 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3176
3177 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3178
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003179- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3180 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3181 size of the executable.
3182
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003183- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3184 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3185 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3186 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003187
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003188- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3189
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003190- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3191 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3192 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003193
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003194- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3195 well as Unix.
3196
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003197- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3198 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3199 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3200 modules in the README file for details.
3201
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003202C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003203-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003204
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003205- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3206 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003207 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003208 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003209 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003210
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003211- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3212 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3213 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3214 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3215 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3216 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003217 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003218 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3219 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3220 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3221 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3222 aligned.)
3223
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003224- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3225 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3226 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3227
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003228- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3229 level.
3230
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003231- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3232 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3233 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3234 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3235 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3236
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003237- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3238 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3239 code.
3240
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003241- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3242 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3243 adjusting for negative indices.
3244
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003245- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3246 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3247 object.
3248
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003249- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3250 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3251 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3252
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003253- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3254 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003255
3256- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3257
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003258- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3259 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3260 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3261 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3262
3263- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3264
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003265- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003266
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003267- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003268 without going through the buffer API.
3269
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003270- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003271
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003272- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3273 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3274 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3275 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3276
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003277- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3278 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3279
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003280- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003281 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3282
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003283New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003284-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003285
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003286- OpenVMS is now supported.
3287
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003288- AtheOS is now supported.
3289
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003290- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3291
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003292- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3293
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003294Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003295-----
3296
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003297- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3298 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3299 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003300
3301Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003302-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003303
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003304- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3305 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3306 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3307 bugs.
3308 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003309 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003310 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3311 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003312 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003313
3314- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003315 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003316
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003317- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3318 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3319
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003320- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3321 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003322 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003323 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3324
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003325- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3326 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3327 use files" uninstall option).
3328
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003329- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3330
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003331- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3332 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3333
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003334- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3335 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3336 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3337
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003338- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3339 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3340 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3341 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3342 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003343 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3344 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3345 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003346
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003347- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003348 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003349 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3350 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3351 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3352 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3353 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3354 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3355 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3356 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3357 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3358 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3359 work around.
3360
3361- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3362 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3363 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3364 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3365 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3366 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3367 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3368 specified with O_CREAT too).
3369
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003370Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003371----
3372
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003373- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003374
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003375- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3376 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3377 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3378
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003379- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3380 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3381 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3382
3383- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3384 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3385 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3386 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3387 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3388 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3389 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3390 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003391
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003392- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3393 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3394 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003395
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003396- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3397 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3398 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3399 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3400 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003401
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003402- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3403 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3404 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003405
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003406- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3407 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003408
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003409- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3410 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3411 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3412 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3413 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003414
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003415- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3416 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3417 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3418
3419- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3420 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3421 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003422
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003423- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3424 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3425 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3426 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003427 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003428
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003429- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3430 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003431
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003432- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3433 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003434
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003435- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003436 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003437 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3438 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003439
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003440
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003441What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003442===============================
3443
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003444*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3445
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003446Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003447--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003448
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003449- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3450 with a custom metaclass.
3451
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003452Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003453-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003454
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003455- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3456 are proxies.
3457
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003458Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003459-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003460
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003461- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3462 very short strings.
3463
3464- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3465 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3466 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3467 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3468 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3469
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003470Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003471-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003472
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003473- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3474 close or delete time).
3475
3476- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3477 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3478
3479- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3480
3481- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003482 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003483
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003484Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003485-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003486
3487Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003488-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003489
3490C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003491-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003492
3493New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003494-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003495
3496Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003497-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003498
3499Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003500-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003501
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003502- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3503
3504- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3505 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3506
3507- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3508 deleted at process exit time.
3509
3510- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3511 in backslash.
3512
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003513Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003514----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003515
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003516- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3517 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3518 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3519
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003520
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003521What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003522===========================
3523
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003524*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3525
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003526Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003527--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003528
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003529- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3530 been extensively updated. See
3531
3532 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3533
3534 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3535
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003536- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3537 deleted!
3538
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003539- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3540 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3541 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3542 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3543 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3544
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003545- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3546
3547 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3548 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3549
3550 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3551 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3552 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3553 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3554 supported anyway.
3555
3556 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3557 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3558
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003559- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3560 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3561 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3562 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3563 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003564
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003565- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3566 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3567 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3568
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003569Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003570-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003571
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003572- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3573 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3574 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3575 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3576 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3577 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003578 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3579 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3580 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3581 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003582
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003583- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3584 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3585 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3586
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003587Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003588-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003589
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003590- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3591
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003592Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003593-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003594
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003595- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3596 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3597 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3598 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3599 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3600 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3601
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003602- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3603
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003604- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3605
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003606- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3607
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003608- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3609 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3610 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3611
3612- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3613
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003614Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003615-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003616
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003617- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3618 off a search on Google.
3619
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003620Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003621-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003622
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003623- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3624 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3625 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3626 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3627 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3628 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3629 other platforms should do likewise.
3630
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003631- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3632 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3633 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3634
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003635C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003636-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003637
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003638- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3639 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3640 producing key-value pairs.
3641
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003642- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003643 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003644 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3645 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3646 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3647 previously went unchallenged.
3648
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003649New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003650-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003651
3652Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003653-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003654
3655Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003656-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003657
3658Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003659----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003660
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003661- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3662 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003663
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003664- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3665 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3666 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3667 home.
3668
3669
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003670What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003671===========================
3672
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003673*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3674
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003675Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003676--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003677
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003678- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3679 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003680
3681 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003682 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003683
3684 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3685 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003686 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003687 This needs to be documented.
3688
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003689- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3690 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3691
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003692- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3693 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3694 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3695
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003696- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3697 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3698
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003699- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3700 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3701 class forbids it).
3702
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003703- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3704 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3705 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3706
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003707- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3708
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003709Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003710-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003711
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003712- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3713 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003714 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003715
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003716- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3717 (like 1 + '').
3718
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003719Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003720-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003721
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003722- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3723 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3724 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3725 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003726 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003727 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3728
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003729- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3730 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3731 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3732 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3733
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003734- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3735 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003736 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3737 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3738 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003739
3740- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3741 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003742
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003743- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3744 bytes on its input.
3745
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003746Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003747-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003748
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003749- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003750 convenience function.
3751
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003752- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3753 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3754 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003755 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3756 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3757 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3758 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3759 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3760 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003761
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003762- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3763 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3764 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3765 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3766
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003767- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3768 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3769 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3770
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003771- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3772 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3773 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3774 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3775
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003776- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3777 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003778 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003779 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3780 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3781 new -l and -e options.
3782
3783- statcache is now deprecated.
3784
3785- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3786 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003787 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003788 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3789 time properly taken into account.
3790
3791- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3792 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3793 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3794 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3795
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003796Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003797-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003798
3799Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003800-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003801
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003802- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3803 is built with libdb3 if available.
3804
3805- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3806
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003807C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003808-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003809
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003810- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3811 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3812 PySequence_Size().
3813
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003814- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3815
3816- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3817 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3818 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3819
3820- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3821 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3822
3823- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3824 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3825
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003826New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003827-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003828
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003829- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3830 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3831
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003832- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3833 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3834
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003835- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3836
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003837Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003838-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003839
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003840- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3841 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3842
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003843Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003844-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003845
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003846Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003847----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003848
3849- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3850 removed completely in the next release.
3851
3852- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3853 OSX.
3854
3855- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3856 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3857
3858- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3859
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003860
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003861What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003862===========================
3863
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003864*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3865
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003866Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003867--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003868
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003869- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003870 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003871 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003872 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3873 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003874 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3875 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003876 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3877 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003878
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003879- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3880 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3881
3882- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3883 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3884
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003885Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003886-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003887
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003888- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3889 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3890 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3891 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3892 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3893 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3894 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3895 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3896
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003897- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3898 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3899 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3900 example).
3901
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003902- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003903 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003904 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003905 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003906
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003907- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3908 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3909 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003910 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003911
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003912- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3913 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3914 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3915 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3916 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3917 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3918
3919 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3920
3921 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3922
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003923Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003924-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003925
3926- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3927
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003928- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3929
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003930- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3931 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003932
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003933- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3934 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3935 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3936 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3937 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3938 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003939 attributes.
3940
3941- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3942 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3943 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003944
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003945- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3946 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3947 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003948
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003949- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3950 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3951 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003952 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3953 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3954
3955- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3956 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003957
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003958Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003959-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003960
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003961- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3962 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3963
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003964- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3965 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3966 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3967 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3968
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003969- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3970 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3971 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3972 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3973
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003974 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3975 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3976 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3977 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3978 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3979 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3980 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3981 without losing information).
3982
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003983- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003984 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3985 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3986 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3987 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3988 module).
3989
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003990 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003991 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3992 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3993 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3994 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003995
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003996- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003997 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3998 encoding.
3999
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004000- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4001 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4002
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004003- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004004 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4005
4006- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4007 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4008 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4009 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4010
4011- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4012
4013- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4014 ON, and OFF.
4015
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004016- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4017 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4018
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004019Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004020-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004021
4022- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4023 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4024 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004025
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004026- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4027 been added: -X and -E.
4028
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004029Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004030-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004031
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004032- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4033 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4034
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004035C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004036-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004037
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004038- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4039 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4040 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4041 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4042 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4043
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004044- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4045 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4046 as long) arguments.
4047
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004048- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4049 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4050 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4051 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4052 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4053 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4054
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004055- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4056 input.
4057
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004058New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004059-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004060
4061Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004062-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004063
4064Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004065-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004066
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004067- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4068 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4069 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4070
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004071- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4072 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4073 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004074 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004075
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004076 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4077 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4078 import signal
4079 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004080
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004081 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004082 while 1:
4083 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004084 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004085 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4086 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4087 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4088 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004089
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004090
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004091What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4092===========================
4093
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004094*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4095
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004096Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004097--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004098
4099- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4100 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4101 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4102
4103- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4104 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4105 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4106 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4107 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4108 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4109 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004110
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004111- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004112 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004113 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4114 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4115 associate a docstring with a property.
4116
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004117- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4118 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4119 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4120 other built-in object types.
4121
4122- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4123 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4124 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4125 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4126 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4127
4128- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4129 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4130
4131- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4132 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004133 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004134 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4135 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4136 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4137 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4138 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4139
4140- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4141 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4142 class.
4143
4144- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4145 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4146 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4147 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4148
4149- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4150 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4151 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4152 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4153
4154- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4155 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4156
4157- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4158 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4159 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4160 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4161 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004162 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004163 with the same value as s.
4164
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004165- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4166
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004167Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004168----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004169
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004170- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4171
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004172- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4173 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4174 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4175 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4176 objects.
4177
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004178- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4179 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004180 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4181 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4182
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004183- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4184 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4185 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4186
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004187Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004188-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004189
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004190- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4191 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4192 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4193 by the instances.
4194
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004195- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4196 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4197 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4198
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004199- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4200 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4201 before the entire comparison is complete.
4202
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004203- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4204 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4205 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4206
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004207- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4208 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4209 getwriter().
4210
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004211- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4212 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4213
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004214- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004215 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4216 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4217
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004218- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4219 iterable object.
4220
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004221- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4222 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004223
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004224- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4225 authentication.
4226
4227- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4228 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004229
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004230- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004231 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4232 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4233 a sample driver.)
4234
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004235Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004236-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004237
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004238- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4239 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4240 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4241 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4242 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4243 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4244 kernel has large file support.
4245
4246- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4247 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4248 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4249 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4250 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4251
4252- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4253 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4254 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4255
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004256C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004257-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004258
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004259- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4260 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4261
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004262New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004263-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004264
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004265- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4266 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4267
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004268Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004269-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004270
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004271- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4272 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4273 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4274 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4275 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4276
4277- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4278 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4279 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4280 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4281
4282- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4283 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4284
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004285Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004286-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004287
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004288- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004289 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4290 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004291
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004292
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004293What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4294===========================
4295
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004296*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4297
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004298Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004299----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004300
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004301- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4302 big to represent as a C double.
4303
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004304- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4305 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4306 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4307 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4308 restriction).
4309
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004310- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4311 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4312 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4313 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4314 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4315
4316 >>> dir([])
4317 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4318 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4319 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4320 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4321 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4322 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4323 'reverse', 'sort']
4324
4325 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4326
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004327- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004328 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4329 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4330 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4331 OverflowError exception.
4332
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004333- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004334 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004335 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4336 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4337 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4338 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4339 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004340 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004341 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4342 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4343
4344 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4345 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4346 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4347 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004348
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004349- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004350 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4351 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4352 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4353 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4354 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4355 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4356 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4357 once it is created.
4358
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004359- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4360 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4361 (key, value) pairs.
4362
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004363- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004364 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4365 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4366
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004367- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4368 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4369 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4370 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4371 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004372
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004373- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004374 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4375 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4376
4377 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4378
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004379- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004380 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4381
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004382Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004383-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004384
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004385- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004386 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4387 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004388
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004389- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4390 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4391 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4392 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4393 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4394 in this area anymore).
4395
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004396- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4397 threading.Timer.
4398
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004399- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4400 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4401
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004402- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004403 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4404
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004405- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004406 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4407 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4408 converted to Python longs.
4409
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004410- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004411 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4412
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004413- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4414 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4415 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4416
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004417Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004418-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004419
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004420- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4421 division operators as per PEP 238.
4422
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004423Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004424-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004425
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004426- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4427 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4428 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4429 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4430
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004431C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004432-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004433
4434- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004435
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004436- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4437 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004438 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004439
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004440 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4441 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004442 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004443 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004444
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004445- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004446 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4447 module:
4448
4449 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004450
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004451 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4452 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004453
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004454 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4455 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004456
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004457 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4458
4459 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4460
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004461- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004462 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4463 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4464 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004465
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004466New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004467-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004468
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004469- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4470 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4471 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4472 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4473 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004474
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004475Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004476-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004477
4478Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004479-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004480
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004481- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4482 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4483 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4484 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004485 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4486 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4487 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4488 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4489 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004490
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004491- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004492 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4493
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004494
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004495What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4496===========================
4497
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004498*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4499
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004500Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004501-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004502
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004503- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4504 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4505
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004506- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4507 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4508 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004509
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004510- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4511 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4512 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4513 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004514
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004515- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4516
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004517- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004518
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004519Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004520-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004521
4522- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004523 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004524 the module docstring for details.
4525
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004526Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004527-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004528
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004529- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004530 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4531 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4532 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004533
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004534- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4535 Nick Mathewson.
4536
4537Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004538----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004539
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004540- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4541 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4542 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4543 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4544 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4545 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4546 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4547 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4548
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004549- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4550 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4551 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4552 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4553
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004554- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4555 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4556 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4557 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4558 come a long way).
4559
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004560- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4561 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4562 write filters for these warnings).
4563
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004564- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4565 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4566 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4567 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4568 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4569
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004570- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4571 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4572 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4573 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4574 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4575 older distribution.
4576
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004577Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004578-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004579
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004580- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4581 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004582 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004583
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004584- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4585 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4586 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4587
4588- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4589
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004590- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4591
4592- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4593
4594- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4595
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004596- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004597
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004598- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4599
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004600New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004601-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004602
4603C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004604-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004605
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004606- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4607 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4608 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4609 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4610 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4611 against buffer overruns.
4612
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004613- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004614 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4615 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004616 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4617 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4618 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4619
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004620- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4621 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4622 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4623 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4624 deprecated.
4625
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004626Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004627-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004628
4629- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4630 relevant is found.
4631
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004632
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004633What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004634===========================
4635
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004636*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4637
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004638Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004639----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004640
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004641- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4642 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4643 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4644 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4645 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4646 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4647 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4648 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004649 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004650 repaired.
4651
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004652- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004653 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004654 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4655 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4656 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4657 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4658 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4659 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4660 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4661 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4662
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004663- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4664 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4665 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4666 leading BMO character).
4667
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004668- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4669 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4670 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4671
4672 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4673 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4674 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004675
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004676 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4677 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4678 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4679 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4680 for various simple to use conversions.
4681
4682 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4683 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4684
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004685 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4686 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4687 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4688 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4689 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4690 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4691 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4692 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4693 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4694 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4695 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4696 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4697 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4698 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4699 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004700
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004701- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4702 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4703 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004704 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004705 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004706
4707 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004708 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4709 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4710 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4711 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4712 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004713 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4714 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004715
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004716 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4717 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4718 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004719 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004720
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004721- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4722 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4723 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4724 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4725 floating arithmetic,
4726
4727 x = 9007199254740992.0
4728 print long(x)
4729
4730 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4731 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4732 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4733 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4734 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4735 functions are of good quality).
4736
4737 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4738 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4739 algorithms to break.
4740
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004741- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4742 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4743 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4744 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4745 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4746 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4747 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4748 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4749 order.
4750
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004751- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4752 operation along the most common code paths.
4753
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004754- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4755 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4756
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004757- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4758 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4759 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4760 {}.update(UserDict())
4761
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004762- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4763 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4764 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4765 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4766 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4767 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4768 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4769 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4770
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004771- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004772 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004773
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004774 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004775 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4776 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004777 join() method of strings
4778 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004779 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4780 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004781 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004782 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004783
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004784- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4785 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4786
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004787- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4788 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4789
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004790- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4791 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4792 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4793 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4794
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004795- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4796 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004797 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004798 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4799 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004800
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004801- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4802
4803
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004804Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004805-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004806
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004807- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004808 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004809 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4810 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4811
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004812- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4813 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4814
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004815- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4816 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4817 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4818 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4819
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004820- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4821 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4822 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4823
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004824- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4825
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004826- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4827
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004828- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4829 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4830 that are still imported into string.py).
4831
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004832- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4833
4834- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4835 Now it does.
4836
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004837- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4838
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004839- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4840 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4841 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4842 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4843 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004844 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4845 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004846
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004847- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4848 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4849 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4850 'help(object)'.
4851
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004852Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004853-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004854
4855- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004856 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004857 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4858 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4859
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004860- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004861 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4862 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004863
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004864C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004865-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004866
4867- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4868 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004869
4870----
4871
4872**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**