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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +000015- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
16 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
17 @staticmethod
18 def foo(bar):
19 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect this XXX before 2.4a2)
20
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +000021- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
22 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
23 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
24 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
25 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
26 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
27 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
28 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
29 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
30 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
31 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
32
33 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
34 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
35 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
36 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
37 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
38 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
39 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
40
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +000041- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
42 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
43
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000044- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000045 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000046
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000047- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000048 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000049 which was missing for no apparent reason.
50
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000051- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000052 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
53 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
54
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +000055- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
56 types that support garbage collection.
57
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +000058- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
59
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +000060- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
61 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
62 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
63 Jython.
64
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +000065- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
66
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000067Extension modules
68-----------------
69
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +000070- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
71
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000072Library
73-------
74
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +000075- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
76 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
77 same as when the argument is omitted).
78 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
79
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +000080- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
81
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +000082- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
83 schemes are offered.
84
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +000085- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
86
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +000087- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
88 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
89 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
90
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +000091- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
92
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +000093- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
94 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
95
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +000096- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
97 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
98 when dummy_threading is being used.
99
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000100- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
101 from a tarfile.
102
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000103- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000104 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000105
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000106- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
107 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
108 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
109 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
110
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000111- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
112 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
113
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000114- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
115 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
116 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
117 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
118 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
119 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
120 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
121 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
122 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
123 by some other method in progress).
124
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000125- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
126 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
127 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000128
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000129- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
130
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000131- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
132 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
133 AM Kuchling.
134
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000135- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
136 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
137 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
138
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000139- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
140 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
141 instead of unsigned.
142
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000143- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000144 no longer part of the public API.
145
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000146- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
147 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
148 string methods of the same name).
149
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +0000150- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
151 SF patch 982681.
152
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000153- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000154 SF patch 945642.
155
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000156- doctest unittest integration improvements:
157
158 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
159
160 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
161 DocTestSuites.
162
163- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
164 that provide thread-local data.
165
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000166- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
167 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
168
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000169- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
170
171- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
172 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
173 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
174
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000175- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
176
177 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
178 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
179 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000180
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000181 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
182 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
183 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
184 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
185
186 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
187 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
188
189 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
190 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
191 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
192 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
193
194 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
195 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
196 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
197 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
198 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
199
200 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
201 wrapping help output.
202
203 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
204 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
205 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000206
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000207Tools/Demos
208-----------
209
210Build
211-----
212
213C API
214-----
215
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000216- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
217 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
218 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
219 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
220 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
221 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
222 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
223 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
224 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
225 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
226 its visible semantics have not changed.
227
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000228- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
229 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
230
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000231Documentation
232-------------
233
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000234- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000235
236 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
237 assigning thier values
238
239 - correct my missconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
240
241 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
242
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000243- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000244
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000245New platforms
246-------------
247
248Tests
249-----
250
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000251- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000252 platforms that use the Makefile.
253
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000254- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
255 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
256 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
257
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000258Windows
259-------
260
261Mac
262---
263
264
265
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000266What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
267=================================
268
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000269*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000270
271Core and builtins
272-----------------
273
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000274- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
275 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
276 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
277 objects now (one object instead of three).
278
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000279- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
280 Windows DLLs.
281
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000282- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
283 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000284
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000285- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
286 a new .pyc magic.
287
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000288- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
289 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
290 be there.
291
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000292- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
293 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
294 the LC_NUMERIC category.
295
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000296- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
297 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
298 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
299
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000300- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
301
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000302- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
303 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
304 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000305
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000306- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
307 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
308
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000309- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
310
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000311- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000312 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000313
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000314- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
315
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000316- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
317
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000318- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
319 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
320
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000321- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
322 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
323 Fixes bug #858016 .
324
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000325- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
326 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
327 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
328
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000329- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
330 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
331 improves their performance (about 35%).
332
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000333- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
334 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
335 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
336
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000337- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
338 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
339 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
340 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
341
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000342- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
343 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
344 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
345 length is not known).
346
347- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
348 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000349 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
350 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000351 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
352
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000353- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
354 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
355
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000356- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
357 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
358 keyword arguments.
359
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000360- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
361 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
362 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
363
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000364- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
365 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
366 cases.
367
368- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
369 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
370 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
371 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
372 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
373 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
374 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
375 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
376 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
377 a release build.
378
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000379- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
380 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
381
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000382- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000383 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000384
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000385- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
386 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
387 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
388 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
389 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
390 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
391 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
392 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
393 destroyed.
394
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000395- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
396 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
397 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
398 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
399 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
400 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
401 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
402 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
403
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000404- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
405 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
406 character other than a space.
407
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000408- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
409 by the function object or by the method object, the function
410 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
411 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
412 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
413 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
414 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
415 attributes with the same name.
416
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000417- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
418 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
419 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
420 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
421 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
422 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
423 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
424 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
425 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
426 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
427 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
428 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
429 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
430 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000431
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000432- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
433 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
434 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
435 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
436 This has been repaired.
437
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000438- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
439
440- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
441
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000442- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
443 over a sequence.
444
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000445- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000446 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000447
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000448- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
449
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000450- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
451 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
452 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
453 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
454 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
455 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
456 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
457 records with equal keys is unchanged).
458
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000459- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
460 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
461 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
462
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000463- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
464 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
465 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
466 freelist.
467
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000468- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
469 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
470
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000471- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
472 number.
473
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000474- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
475 a TypeError exception.
476
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000477- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
478 820195.
479
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000480- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
481 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
482 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
483
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000484- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000485 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
486 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000487
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000488- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
489 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
490 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
491
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000492- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
493 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000494 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000495
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000496- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000497 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
498 the first call.
499
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000500
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000501Extension modules
502-----------------
503
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000504- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
505 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
506
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000507- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
508 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
509 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
510 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
511 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
512 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
513 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000514
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000515- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
516
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000517- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
518
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000519- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
520 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
521
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000522- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
523 fewer false positives.
524
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000525- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
526 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
527
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000528- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000529 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
530
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000531- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000532 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000533 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
534 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
535 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000536
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000537- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
538 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
539 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
540 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
541
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000542- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
543 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
544 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
545 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
546 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
547 #897625.
548
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000549- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
550 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
551
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000552- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
553 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
554 and pops on either side of the deque.
555
556- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
557 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
558
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000559- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
560 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
561 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
562 other functions that expect a function argument.
563
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000564- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
565
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000566- os.getsid was added.
567
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000568- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
569 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
570 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
571
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000572- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
573
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000574- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
575
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000576- readline.clear_history was added.
577
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000578- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
579
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000580- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
581
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000582- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
583
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000584- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
585
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000586- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
587
588- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
589
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000590- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
591
592- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
593
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000594- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
595 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
596 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
597
598- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
599 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
600 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
601 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
602 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
603 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
604 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
605
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000606- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
607 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
608 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
609 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000610
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000611- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000612 iterators from a single iterable.
613
614- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
615 of raising a TypeError exception.
616
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000617- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
618 as parameter.
619
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000620Library
621-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000622
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000623- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
624 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
625 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000626
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000627- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
628 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
629 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000630
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000631- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000632
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000633- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
634 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000635
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000636- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
637 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
638
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000639- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
640
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000641- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000642 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000643
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000644- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
645 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
646
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000647- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
648
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000649- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
650 on cygwin and mingw32.
651
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000652- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
653
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000654- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
655 module.
656
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000657- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
658 installation scheme for all platforms.
659
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000660- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000661 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000662
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000663- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
664 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
665 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
666
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000667- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
668 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
669 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
670
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000671- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
672
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000673- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
674
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000675- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
676 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
677
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000678- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
679 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
680 type pattern with the same value exists.
681
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000682- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
683 when run from the command prompt).
684
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000685- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
686 not taken into consideration when caching value.
687
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000688- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
689 default sort).
690
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000691- Added global runctx function to profile module
692
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000693- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
694
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000695- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
696
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000697- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
698
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000699- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000700 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
701 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
702 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
703 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
704 accordingly.
705
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000706- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
707 decoding standards.
708
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000709- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
710 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
711 called for all requests.
712
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000713- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
714 they are passed to the compiler.
715
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000716- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
717 indent, width and depth.
718
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000719- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
720 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
721
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000722- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
723 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
724
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000725- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
726
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000727- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
728
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000729- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
730
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000731- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
732 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
733
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000734- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000735 for better performance.
736
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000737- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000738
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000739- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
740 a string).
741
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000742- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
743
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000744- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
745
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000746- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
747
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000748- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
749
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000750- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
751 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
752 list of fieldnames.
753
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000754- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
755 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
756
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000757- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
758
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000759- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
760 empty lists.
761
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000762- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
763 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
764 and shelves.
765
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000766- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
767 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
768
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000769- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000770 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
771 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000772
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000773- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
774 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000775 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000776
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000777- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000778 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
779 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
780
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000781- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
782 and removed in Py2.4.
783
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000784- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
785
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000786- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
787
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000788Tools/Demos
789-----------
790
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000791- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
792 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
793
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000794- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
795
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000796- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
797 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
798 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
799 destination in situations where both files are given.
800
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000801- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
802 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
803 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
804 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
805
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000806- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
807
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000808- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
809 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
810 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
811 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
812 now.
813
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000814- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
815 in effect
816
817- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
818 C-c C-h
819
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000820- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
821 -d option was given.
822
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000823Build
824-----
825
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000826- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
827 build under OS X.
828
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000829- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
830 --enable-profiling.
831
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000832- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
833 is configured --with-tsc.
834
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000835- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
836 on AMD64.
837
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000838- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
839 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
840
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000841- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
842 removed.
843
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000844- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
845 supported (see PEP 11).
846
847- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
848
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000849- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
850
851- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
852 (see PEP 11).
853
854- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
855 sizeof(char) must be 1.
856
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000857C API
858-----
859
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000860- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
861 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
862 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
863
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000864- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
865 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
866 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
867 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
868
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000869- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
870 generator objects.
871
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000872- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
873 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000874 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
875 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000876
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000877- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
878 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
879
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000880- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
881 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
882 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
883 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
884 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
885
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000886- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
887 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
888 about 10% faster.
889
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000890- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
891 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
892
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000893- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
894 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
895 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
896 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
897
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000898Windows
899-------
900
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000901- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
902 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
903 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
904 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
905
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000906- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
907 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
908 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
909
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000910
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000911What's New in Python 2.3 final?
912===============================
913
914*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
915
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000916IDLE
917----
918
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000919- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
920 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
921 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
922 context-menu actions.
923
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000924- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
925 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
926 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
927 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
928 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
929 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
930 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
931 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
932 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
933
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000934
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000935What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
936=============================================
937
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000938*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000939
940Core and builtins
941-----------------
942
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000943- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000944 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000945 comment at the end are still unsupported.
946
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000947Extension modules
948-----------------
949
950- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
951 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
952 than once. This has been fixed.
953
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000954- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
955 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
956 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
957 call.
958
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000959- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
960
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000961Library
962-------
963
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000964- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
965 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
966
967- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
968 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
969 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
970 restored.
971
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000972IDLE
973----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000974
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000975- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000976
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000977Build
978-----
979
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000980- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
981 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
982
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000983C API
984-----
985
986Windows
987-------
988
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000989- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
990 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
991
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000992- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
993
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000994Mac
995---
996
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000997- Various fixes to pimp.
998
999- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1000
1001- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1002 more problems than it solves.
1003
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001004
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001005What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1006=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001007
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001008*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1009
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001010Core and builtins
1011-----------------
1012
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001013- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1014 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1015
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001016- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1017 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001018 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001019
1020- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1021 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1022 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001023 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001024
1025- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1026 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001027
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001028- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1029 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1030 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1031
1032- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001033 770247.
1034
1035- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001036
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001037Extension modules
1038-----------------
1039
1040- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1041 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1042
1043- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1044
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001045- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1046
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001047- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1048 contained within the _strptime module.
1049
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001050- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1051 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1052
1053- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001054 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1055
1056- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1057 the find_class attribute, if present.
1058
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001059- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001060
1061 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1062 (SF bug 763298).
1063
1064 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001065 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1066 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1067 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001068
1069 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1070
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001071Library
1072-------
1073
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001074- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1075
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001076- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1077 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1078 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1079 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1080 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1081 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1082 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1083 or Tester().
1084
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001085- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1086 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1087 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1088 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1089 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1090 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1091 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1092 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1093 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001094
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001095 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001096
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001097- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1098 weren't before was an oversight.
1099
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001100- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1101 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1102
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001103- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1104 when there are no lines.
1105
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001106- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1107 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1108
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001109- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1110 to child processes.
1111
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001112- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1113
1114- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1115
1116- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1117 xmlrpclib.
1118
1119- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1120 responses.
1121
1122- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1123 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1124
1125- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1126 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1127 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1128
1129- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1130 used as patterns.
1131
1132- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1133 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1134 than Tk 8.3.
1135
1136- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1137
1138- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001139
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001140Tools/Demos
1141-----------
1142
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001143- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1144
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001145- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1146
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001147- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001148
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001149Build
1150-----
1151
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001152- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1153
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001154- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1155
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001156- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1157 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001158
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001159- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1160 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1161 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001162
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001163C API
1164-----
1165
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001166- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1167 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1168
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001169Windows
1170-------
1171
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001172- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1173 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1174 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1175 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1176 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1177 Python exception ::
1178
1179 thread.error: can't start new thread
1180
1181 is raised now.
1182
1183- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1184 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1185 instead of from DLL teardown.
1186
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001187Mac
1188---
1189
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001190- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001191 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001192 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1193 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1194 the executable in the bundle.
1195
1196- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001197
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001198- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1199
1200- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1201 on Panther.
1202
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001203What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1204================================
1205
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001206*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001207
1208Core and builtins
1209-----------------
1210
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001211- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1212 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1213 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1214 with the -i option.
1215
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001216- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1217 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1218
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001219- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1220 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1221
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001222- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1223 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1224 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1225 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1226 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1227 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1228 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1229 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1230 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1231 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1232 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1233 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1234 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001235
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001236- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1237 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1238 embedded in a lambda expression.
1239
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001240- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1241 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1242 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1243 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1244 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1245
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001246- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1247 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1248 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1249
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001250- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1251 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1252
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001253- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1254 It's writable again.
1255
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001256- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1257 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1258 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001259 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001260
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001261- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1262 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1263 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1264
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001265Extension modules
1266-----------------
1267
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001268- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1269 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1270
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001271- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1272 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1273 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1274 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1275
1276- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1277 collection.
1278
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001279- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1280 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1281 unique within a single program run.
1282
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001283- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1284 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1285
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001286- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1287 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1288
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001289- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1290 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001291
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001292- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1293
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001294- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1295 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1296
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001297- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1298 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1299 for many BSD-derived systems.
1300
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001301
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001302Library
1303-------
1304
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001305- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1306 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1307 primary ones:
1308
1309 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1310 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1311 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1312
1313 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1314 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1315 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1316 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1317 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1318 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1319
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001320- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1321 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1322 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1323 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1324 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1325 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1326 argument.
1327
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001328- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1329 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1330 in the archive.
1331
1332- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1333 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1334
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001335- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1336 569574).
1337
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001338- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1339 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1340 no more.
1341
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001342- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1343 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1344 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1345 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1346 code coverage.
1347
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001348- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1349 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1350 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001351 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1352 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001353
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001354- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1355 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1356 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001357 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001358
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001359- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1360
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001361- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1362 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1363 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1364 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1365
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001366- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1367 handling.
1368
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001369- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1370 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1371
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001372- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1373 in socket.py.
1374
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001375- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1376
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001377- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1378 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1379 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1380 opener with proxy support.
1381
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001382- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1383
1384- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1385
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001386Tools/Demos
1387-----------
1388
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001389- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1390
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001391- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1392
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001393- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1394 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001395
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001396- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1397 files.
1398
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001399Build
1400-----
1401
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001402- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001403 different root directory.
1404
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001405C API
1406-----
1407
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001408- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1409 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1410 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1411 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1412 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1413 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1414 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1415 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1416 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1417 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1418
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001419- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1420 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1421 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1422 from Python.
1423
1424
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001425New platforms
1426-------------
1427
1428None this time.
1429
1430Tests
1431-----
1432
1433- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1434 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1435
1436Windows
1437-------
1438
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001439- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1440
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001441- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1442 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1443 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1444 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1445 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1446 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1447 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1448 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1449 that's what it's for.
1450
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001451Mac
1452---
1453
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001454- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1455 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1456 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1457 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001458- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1459 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1460- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001461
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001462SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1463------------------------------------
1464
1465430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1466598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1467622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1468661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1469683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1470697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1471713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1472724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1473727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1474729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1475730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1476731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1477732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1478733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1479735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1480740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1481744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1482745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1483747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1484749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1485751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1486753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1487755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1488757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1489760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1490
1491
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001492What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1493================================
1494
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001495*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001496
1497Core and builtins
1498-----------------
1499
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001500- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1501 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1502
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001503- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1504 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1505 and cannot be strings).
1506
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001507- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1508 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1509 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1510 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1511
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001512- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1513 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1514 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1515 Python itself.
1516
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001517- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1518 the referenced object, if it has one.
1519
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001520- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1521 the thread started at
1522 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1523
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001524- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1525 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1526 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1527 placed on a list index.
1528
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001529- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1530 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1531 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1532 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1533
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001534- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1535 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1536 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1537 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1538 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1539 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1540 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1541
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001542- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1543 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1544 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1545 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1546 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1547
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001548- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1549 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001550
1551- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1552 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1553 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1554 #693195.)
1555
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001556- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1557 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001558
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001559- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001560 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001561 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1562 interpreter executions, would fail.
1563
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001564- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001565 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001566 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001567
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001568Extension modules
1569-----------------
1570
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001571- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1572 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1573 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1574 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1575
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001576- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1577 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1578
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001579- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1580 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1581 and Greg Chapman.)
1582
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001583- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1584 recursively.
1585
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001586- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001587 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1588 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1589 leaks.
1590
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001591- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1592
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001593- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1594 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1595 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1596 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1597 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1598 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1599 #705836.
1600
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001601- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001602 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1603
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001604- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1605 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1606 See SF bug #692416.
1607
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001608- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1609 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1610
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001611- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1612 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1613 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001614
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001615- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001616 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1617 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1618
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001619- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1620 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1621 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1622 timeouts to work properly.
1623
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001624Library
1625-------
1626
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001627- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1628 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1629 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1630 future release.
1631
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001632- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1633 for querying platform dependent features.
1634
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001635- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001636
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001637- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1638 pickle protocol versions.
1639
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001640- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1641 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1642 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1643
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001644- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1645
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001646- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1647 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1648 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1649 modules.
1650
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001651- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1652 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1653 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1654
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001655- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1656 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1657
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001658- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1659 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1660 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1661
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001662- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001663 MS Office extensions.
1664
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001665- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1666 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1667
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001668- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1669 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1670
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001671- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1672 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1673 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1674 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1675 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1676 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1677
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001678- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1679 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1680 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001681
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001682- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1683 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1684 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1685
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001686- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1687
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001688- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1689 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1690 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1691
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001692Tools/Demos
1693-----------
1694
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001695- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1696 See the module docstring for details.
1697
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001698Build
1699-----
1700
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001701- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1702 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001703
1704C API
1705-----
1706
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001707- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1708
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001709- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1710 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1711 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1712
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001713- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1714 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001715
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001716 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1717 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1718 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001719
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001720- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001721 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1722
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001723- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1724 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1725 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001726
1727New platforms
1728-------------
1729
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001730None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001731
1732Tests
1733-----
1734
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001735- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1736 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001737
1738Windows
1739-------
1740
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001741- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1742 function.
1743
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001744- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1745 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001746
1747Mac
1748---
1749
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001750- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1751 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001752
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001753- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1754 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001755
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001756- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1757 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1758 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001759
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001760- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001761 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1762 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001763
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001764- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1765 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001766
1767
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001768What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1769=================================
1770
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001771*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001772
1773Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001774-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001775
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001776- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1777 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1778 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1779
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001780- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1781 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1782 (SF patch #664376.)
1783
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001784- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1785 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1786 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1787 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1788 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1789 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001790 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001791
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001792- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1793 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1794 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1795 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001796 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001797
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001798- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1799 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1800 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1801 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1802 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1803 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1804 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1805 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1806 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1807 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1808 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1809
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001810- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1811 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1812 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1813 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1814 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1815 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1816
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001817- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1818 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1819
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001820- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1821 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1822 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1823 case.)
1824
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001825- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1826 passed as unicode strings.
1827
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001828- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1829 See SF bug #683467.
1830
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001831- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1832 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1833
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001834- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1835
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001836- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1837
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001838- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1839 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1840 arguments.
1841
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001842- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1843 See SF bug #667147.
1844
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001845- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001846 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001847 See SF bug #676155.
1848
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001849- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001850 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001851 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1852 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1853 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1854 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1855 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1856 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001857
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001858Extension modules
1859-----------------
1860
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001861- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1862 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1863 tp_as_number pointer.
1864
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001865- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1866 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1867 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1868 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1869 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1870
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001871- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1872
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001873- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1874
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001875- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001876 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001877 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1878 patch #678531.)
1879
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001880- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1881 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1882
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001883- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1884 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1885
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001886- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1887
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001888- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1889 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1890 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1891
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001892- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1893
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001894- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1895 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1896
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001897- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001898
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001899- datetime changes:
1900
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001901 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1902
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001903 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1904 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1905 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1906 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1907 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1908 now.
1909
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001910 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001911 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1912 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001913
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001914 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001915 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001916 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1917 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1918 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1919 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001920
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001921 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1922 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1923 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001924 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1925
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001926 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1927 by a later example coded by Guido.
1928
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001929 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001930 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1931 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1932 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001933 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1934 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1935
1936 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1937 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1938 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1939 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1940 tzinfo subclass instance.
1941
1942 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1943 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1944 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1945 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1946 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1947 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1948 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1949 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001950
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001951 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1952 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1953 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1954 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1955 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001956 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1957
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001958 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001959
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001960 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1961 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1962 as a naive datetime object.
1963
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001964 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1965 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1966 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1967
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001968 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1969 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1970 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1971 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1972 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1973 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1974 comparison.
1975
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001976 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1977 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1978 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1979 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001980 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001981
1982 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001983
1984 and ::
1985
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001986 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1987
1988 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1989 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1990 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1991 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1992
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001993 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1994 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1995 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1996 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1997 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1998
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001999 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2000 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002001 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2002 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002003
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002004Library
2005-------
2006
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002007- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2008 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2009
2010- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2011 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2012 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2013 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2014 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2015 See PEP 307 for details.
2016
2017- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2018 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2019
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002020- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2021 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002022 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002023 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2024 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002025 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002026
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002027- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2028 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2029
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002030- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2031 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2032 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2033
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002034- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2035
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002036- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2037 exception.
2038
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002039- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2040 class.
2041
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002042- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2043 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2044 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2045
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002046- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2047 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2048
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002049- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002050 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2051 See SF bug #659228.
2052
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002053- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2054 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2055 See SF patch #651082.
2056
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002057- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002058
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002059- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2060 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2061
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002062- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002063 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002064
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002065- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2066 DOS paths from other platforms.
2067
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002068Tools/Demos
2069-----------
2070
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002071- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2072 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2073 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2074 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2075 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2076 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2077 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2078 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2079 example:
2080
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002081 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2082 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002083
2084 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2085
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002086
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002087Build
2088-----
2089
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002090- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2091 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2092 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002093 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2094
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002095 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2096
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002097- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2098 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2099 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2100 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2101 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2102 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2103 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2104 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2105 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2106
2107- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2108 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2109 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2110 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2111
2112- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2113 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2114
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002115C API
2116-----
2117
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002118- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2119 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002120
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002121- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2122 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2123 tp_as_number pointer.
2124
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002125- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2126 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2127 (SF #681367)
2128
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002129- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2130 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2131 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2132 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002133
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002134Tests
2135-----
2136
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002137- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002138 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2139 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2140 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2141 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2142 pydoc.)
2143
2144- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2145
2146- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002147
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002148Windows
2149-------
2150
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002151- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2152 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2153 time).
2154
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002155- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2156 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2157
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002158- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2159 release without strong cryptography.
2160
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002161- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002162 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002163
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002164- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2165 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2166
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002167Mac
2168---
2169
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002170- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2171 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002172
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002173- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2174 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2175 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002176
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002177- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2178 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002179
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002180- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2181 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2182 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2183 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002184
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002185- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002186 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2187 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2188 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002189
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002190
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002191What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002192=================================
2193
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002194*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002195
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002196Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002197--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002198
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002199- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2200
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002201- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2202 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002203 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002204 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002205 a different meaning than before.
2206
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002207- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002208 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002209 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002210
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002211- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002212 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002213 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002214
2215- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2216 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2217 and deallocation.
2218
2219- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2220 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2221
2222- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2223 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2224 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2225 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2226 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2227
2228- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2229 now detected by the garbage collector.
2230
2231- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2232 [SF bug 519621]
2233
2234- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2235 identifier.
2236
2237- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2238 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2239 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2240 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2241 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2242 [SF bug 563060]
2243
2244- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2245 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2246 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2247 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2248 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2249
2250- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2251 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2252 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2253
2254- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2255
2256- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2257 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2258 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2259 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2260 state of the slots would be lost.)
2261
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002262Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002263-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002264
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002265- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002266 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2267 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2268 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2269 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002270 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2271 Jython 2.1.
2272
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002273- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002274 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002275 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2276 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2277 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2278 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2279 these, see PEP 302.
2280
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002281- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2282 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2283 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2284
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002285- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2286 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2287 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2288
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002289- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2290 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2291 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2292
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002293- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2294 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2295 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2296 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2297 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2298 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2299 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2300 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2301 releases or implementations.
2302
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002303- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002304 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2305 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002306
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002307- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2308 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2309
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002310- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2311 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2312 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2313
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002314- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2315 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2316
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002317- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2318 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002319 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2320 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002321
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002322- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2323 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2324 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2325 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2326 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2327
2328 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2329 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2330 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2331 pattern.
2332
2333 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2334 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2335 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2336 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2337
2338 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2339 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2340 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2341 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2342 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2343 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2344
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002345- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2346 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2347 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2348 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2349 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2350 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2351 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2352 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002353
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002354- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2355 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2356 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2357 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2358 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002359 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2360 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2361 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2362 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2363 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2364 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2365 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002366
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002367- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2368 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2369
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002370- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2371 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2372 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2373 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2374 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2375 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2376 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2377 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2378 to Zack Weinberg!
2379
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002380- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2381 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2382 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2383 type. This has been fixed now.
2384
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002385- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2386 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2387 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2388
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002389- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2390 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2391 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2392 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2393 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2394 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2395 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2396 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002397 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002398
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002399- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2400 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2401 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002402
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002403- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2404 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2405 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2406 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2407 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2408 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2409 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2410 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002411 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002412 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2413 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2414
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002415- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2416 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2417 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2418 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2419 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2420 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2421 this.)
2422
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002423- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2424 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002425 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002426 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002427 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2428 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002429 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2430 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002431
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002432- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2433 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2434 currently running.
2435
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002436- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2437 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2438 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2439 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2440
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002441- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2442 as directory names.
2443
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002444- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2445 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2446
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002447- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2448 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2449
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002450- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002451 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2452 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002453
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002454- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2455 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2456 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2457 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2458 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2459
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002460- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2461 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2462 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2463 removed.
2464
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002465- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2466 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2467 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2468
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002469- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2470 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2471 to __debug__.
2472
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002473- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2474 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2475 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2476
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002477- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2478 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2479 deprecated now.
2480
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002481- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2482 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2483 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002484
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002485- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2486 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2487 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2488 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2489 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002490
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002491- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2492 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2493
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002494- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2495 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2496 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002497 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002498 is backward compatible.
2499
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002500- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2501 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2502 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2503 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2504 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2505
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002506- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2507 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2508 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2509 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2510 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2511 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002512
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002513- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2514 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2515
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002516- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2517 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2518
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002519- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2520 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2521 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2522 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2523 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2524
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002525- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2526 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2527 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2528
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002529- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002530 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2531
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002532- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2533 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2534 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002535
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002536- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2537 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2538
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002539- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2540 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2541 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2542
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002543- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2544
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002545Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002546-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002547
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002548- Added three operators to the operator module:
2549 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2550 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2551 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2552
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002553- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2554
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002555- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2556 archives.
2557
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002558- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2559 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2560 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2561
2562 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2563
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002564- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2565 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2566 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002567 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002568
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002569- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2570 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2571 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2572 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002573 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2574 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2575 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2576 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002577
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002578- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2579 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002580
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002581- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2582
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002583- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2584 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2585
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002586- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2587 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2588 supported.
2589
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002590- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2591
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002592- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2593 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002594
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002595- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2596 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2597
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002598- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2599
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002600- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2601 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2602
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002603- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2604 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2605 functions but callable type objects.
2606
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002607- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002608 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002609 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002610
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002611- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2612 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002613
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002614- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2615 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002616
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002617- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2618 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2619 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2620 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2621
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002622- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2623 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002624
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002625- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2626 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2627 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2628 and __imul__.
2629
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002630- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002631 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2632 is called.
2633
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002634- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2635 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2636 interpreter was compiled.
2637
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002638- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2639 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2640 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002641 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002642 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2643 1, not 2.
2644
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002645- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2646 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2647 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2648 limit.
2649
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002650- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2651 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2652 bug #623464.
2653
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002654- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2655 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2656 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2657 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2658
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002659Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002660-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002661
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002662- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2663
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002664- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2665 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2666 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2667 with Python 2.3a2.
2668
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002669- os.path exposes getctime.
2670
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002671- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002672 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002673 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002674 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002675 unit tests of floating point results.
2676
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002677- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2678 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2679 has been increased.
2680
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002681- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2682 executed.
2683
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002684- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2685 postinstallation script.
2686
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002687- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2688 test the current module.
2689
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002690- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002691 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2692 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2693 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2694 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2695
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002696- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002697 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002698 Ward's Optik package.
2699
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002700- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2701 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2702 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2703 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2704
2705- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2706 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002707 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002708
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002709- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2710 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2711 shelf are binary pickles.
2712
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002713- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2714 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2715
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002716- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2717 modules are iterators now.
2718
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002719- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2720 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2721 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2722 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2723 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2724 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002725
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002726- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2727 with their entity value.
2728
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002729- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2730
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002731- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2732 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002733
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002734- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2735 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002736 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002737
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002738- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2739 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2740 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2741 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2742 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2743 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2744 main():
2745
2746 import locale
2747 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2748
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002749- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2750 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2751
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002752- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2753 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2754 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2755 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2756 to the new standard.
2757
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002758- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2759 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2760 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2761 an extension to the database.
2762
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002763- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2764 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2765 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2766 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002767 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002768
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002769- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002770 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002771
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002772- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2773 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2774 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2775 bounded integers.
2776
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002777- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2778 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2779 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2780 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2781 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2782 in existence.
2783
2784 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2785 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2786 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2787 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2788 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2789 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2790
2791 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2792 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2793 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2794 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2795
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002796- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2797 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2798 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2799
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002800- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2801
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002802- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2803 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2804 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2805 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2806
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002807- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2808 argument.
2809
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002810- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2811 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2812 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2813 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2814 [SF patch 560794].
2815
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002816- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2817 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2818 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002819 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2820 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2821 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002822
2823- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2824 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002825
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002826- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2827 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2828 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2829 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002830
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002831- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2832 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2833 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2834 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2835 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2836
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002837- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002838
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002839- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2840
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002841- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2842 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2843 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2844 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2845 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2846 identical to None.
2847
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002848- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2849 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2850 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2851 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2852 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2853 results now.
2854
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002855- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2856 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2857
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002858- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2859 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2860 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2861 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2862 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2863 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2864 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2865 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2866
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002867- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2868
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002869- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2870 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2871
2872- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2873 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2874 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2875 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2876 and other systems.
2877
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002878- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2879 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2880 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2881 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 +00002882 work well with these.
2883
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002884- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2885
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002886- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002887 connections.
2888
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002889- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2890 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2891 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2892
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002893- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2894 sets
2895
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002896- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2897 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2898 name.
2899
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002900- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2901 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2902 passed in.
2903
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002904- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002905 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002906 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2907 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002908
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002909- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2910
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002911- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2912
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002913- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2914 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2915 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2916
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002917- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2918 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2919 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2920 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002921 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002922
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002923- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002924 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002925 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002926
2927- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2928 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2929 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2930
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002931- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002932 the value of its expression argument.
2933
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002934- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2935 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2936 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2937
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002938- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2939 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2940 skipstone browser was included.
2941
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002942- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2943 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2944
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002945Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002946-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002947
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002948- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2949 names in addition to accepting file names.
2950
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002951- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2952 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2953 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2954 still used and useful.)
2955
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002956- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2957 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2958 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2959 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002960
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002961- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2962 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2963 the generated binary.
2964
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002965Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002966-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002967
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002968- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2969
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002970- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2971 except in the hands of experts.
2972
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002973- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002974 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2975 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2976 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002977
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002978- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2979 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2980 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2981 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2982 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2983 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2984 builds.
2985
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002986- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2987 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2988 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2989 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2990 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2991 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2992 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2993 new type.
2994
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002995- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002996
2997 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2998 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2999 positive infinities.
3000
3001 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3002 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3003 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3004 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3005 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3006 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3007 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3008
3009 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3010
3011 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3012
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003013- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3014 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3015 size of the executable.
3016
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003017- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3018 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3019 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3020 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003021
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003022- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3023
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003024- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3025 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3026 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003027
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003028- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3029 well as Unix.
3030
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003031- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3032 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3033 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3034 modules in the README file for details.
3035
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003036C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003037-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003038
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003039- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3040 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003041 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003042 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003043 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003044
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003045- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3046 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3047 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3048 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3049 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3050 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003051 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003052 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3053 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3054 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3055 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3056 aligned.)
3057
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003058- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3059 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3060 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3061
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003062- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3063 level.
3064
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003065- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3066 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3067 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3068 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3069 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3070
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003071- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3072 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3073 code.
3074
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003075- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3076 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3077 adjusting for negative indices.
3078
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003079- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3080 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3081 object.
3082
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003083- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3084 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3085 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3086
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003087- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3088 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003089
3090- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3091
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003092- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3093 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3094 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3095 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3096
3097- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3098
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003099- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003100
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003101- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003102 without going through the buffer API.
3103
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003104- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003105
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003106- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3107 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3108 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3109 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3110
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003111- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3112 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3113
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003114- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003115 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3116
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003117New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003118-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003119
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003120- OpenVMS is now supported.
3121
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003122- AtheOS is now supported.
3123
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003124- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3125
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003126- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3127
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003128Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003129-----
3130
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003131- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3132 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3133 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003134
3135Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003136-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003137
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003138- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3139 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3140 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3141 bugs.
3142 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003143 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003144 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3145 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003146 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003147
3148- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003149 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003150
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003151- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3152 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3153
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003154- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3155 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003156 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003157 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3158
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003159- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3160 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3161 use files" uninstall option).
3162
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003163- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3164
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003165- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3166 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3167
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003168- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3169 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3170 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3171
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003172- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3173 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3174 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3175 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3176 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003177 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3178 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3179 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003180
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003181- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003182 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003183 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3184 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3185 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3186 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3187 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3188 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3189 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3190 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3191 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3192 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3193 work around.
3194
3195- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3196 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3197 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3198 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3199 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3200 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3201 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3202 specified with O_CREAT too).
3203
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003204Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003205----
3206
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003207- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003208
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003209- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3210 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3211 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3212
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003213- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3214 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3215 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3216
3217- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3218 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3219 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3220 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3221 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3222 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3223 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3224 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003225
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003226- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3227 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3228 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003229
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003230- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3231 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3232 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3233 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3234 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003235
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003236- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3237 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3238 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003239
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003240- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3241 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003242
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003243- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3244 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3245 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3246 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3247 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003248
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003249- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3250 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3251 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3252
3253- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3254 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3255 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003256
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003257- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3258 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3259 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3260 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003261 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003262
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003263- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3264 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003265
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003266- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3267 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003268
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003269- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003270 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003271 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3272 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003273
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003274
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003275What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003276===============================
3277
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003278*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3279
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003280Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003281--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003282
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003283- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3284 with a custom metaclass.
3285
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003286Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003287-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003288
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003289- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3290 are proxies.
3291
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003292Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003293-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003294
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003295- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3296 very short strings.
3297
3298- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3299 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3300 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3301 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3302 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3303
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003304Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003305-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003306
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003307- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3308 close or delete time).
3309
3310- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3311 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3312
3313- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3314
3315- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003316 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003317
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003318Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003319-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003320
3321Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003322-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003323
3324C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003325-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003326
3327New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003328-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003329
3330Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003331-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003332
3333Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003334-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003335
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003336- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3337
3338- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3339 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3340
3341- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3342 deleted at process exit time.
3343
3344- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3345 in backslash.
3346
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003347Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003348----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003349
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003350- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3351 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3352 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3353
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003354
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003355What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003356===========================
3357
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003358*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3359
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003360Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003361--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003362
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003363- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3364 been extensively updated. See
3365
3366 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3367
3368 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3369
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003370- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3371 deleted!
3372
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003373- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3374 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3375 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3376 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3377 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3378
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003379- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3380
3381 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3382 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3383
3384 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3385 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3386 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3387 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3388 supported anyway.
3389
3390 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3391 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3392
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003393- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3394 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3395 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3396 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3397 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003398
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003399- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3400 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3401 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3402
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003403Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003404-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003405
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003406- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3407 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3408 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3409 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3410 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3411 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003412 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3413 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3414 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3415 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003416
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003417- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3418 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3419 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3420
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003421Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003422-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003423
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003424- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3425
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003426Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003427-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003428
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003429- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3430 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3431 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3432 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3433 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3434 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3435
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003436- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3437
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003438- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3439
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003440- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3441
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003442- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3443 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3444 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3445
3446- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3447
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003448Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003449-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003450
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003451- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3452 off a search on Google.
3453
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003454Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003455-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003456
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003457- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3458 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3459 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3460 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3461 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3462 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3463 other platforms should do likewise.
3464
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003465- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3466 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3467 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3468
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003469C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003470-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003471
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003472- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3473 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3474 producing key-value pairs.
3475
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003476- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003477 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003478 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3479 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3480 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3481 previously went unchallenged.
3482
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003483New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003484-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003485
3486Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003487-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003488
3489Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003490-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003491
3492Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003493----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003494
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003495- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3496 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003497
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003498- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3499 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3500 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3501 home.
3502
3503
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003504What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003505===========================
3506
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003507*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3508
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003509Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003510--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003511
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003512- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3513 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003514
3515 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003516 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003517
3518 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3519 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003520 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003521 This needs to be documented.
3522
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003523- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3524 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3525
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003526- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3527 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3528 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3529
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003530- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3531 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3532
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003533- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3534 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3535 class forbids it).
3536
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003537- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3538 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3539 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3540
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003541- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3542
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003543Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003544-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003545
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003546- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3547 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003548 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003549
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003550- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3551 (like 1 + '').
3552
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003553Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003554-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003555
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003556- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3557 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3558 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3559 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003560 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003561 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3562
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003563- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3564 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3565 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3566 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3567
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003568- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3569 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003570 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3571 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3572 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003573
3574- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3575 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003576
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003577- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3578 bytes on its input.
3579
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003580Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003581-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003582
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003583- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003584 convenience function.
3585
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003586- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3587 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3588 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003589 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3590 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3591 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3592 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3593 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3594 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003595
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003596- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3597 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3598 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3599 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3600
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003601- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3602 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3603 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3604
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003605- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3606 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3607 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3608 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3609
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003610- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3611 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003612 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003613 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3614 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3615 new -l and -e options.
3616
3617- statcache is now deprecated.
3618
3619- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3620 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003621 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003622 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3623 time properly taken into account.
3624
3625- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3626 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3627 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3628 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3629
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003630Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003631-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003632
3633Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003634-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003635
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003636- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3637 is built with libdb3 if available.
3638
3639- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3640
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003641C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003642-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003643
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003644- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3645 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3646 PySequence_Size().
3647
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003648- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3649
3650- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3651 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3652 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3653
3654- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3655 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3656
3657- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3658 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3659
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003660New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003661-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003662
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003663- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3664 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3665
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003666- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3667 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3668
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003669- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3670
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003671Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003672-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003673
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003674- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3675 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3676
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003677Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003678-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003679
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003680Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003681----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003682
3683- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3684 removed completely in the next release.
3685
3686- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3687 OSX.
3688
3689- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3690 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3691
3692- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3693
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003694
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003695What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003696===========================
3697
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003698*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3699
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003700Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003701--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003702
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003703- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003704 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003705 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003706 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3707 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003708 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3709 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003710 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3711 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003712
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003713- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3714 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3715
3716- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3717 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3718
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003719Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003720-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003721
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003722- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3723 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3724 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3725 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3726 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3727 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3728 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3729 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3730
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003731- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3732 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3733 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3734 example).
3735
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003736- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003737 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003738 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003739 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003740
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003741- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3742 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3743 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003744 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003745
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003746- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3747 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3748 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3749 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3750 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3751 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3752
3753 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3754
3755 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3756
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003757Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003758-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003759
3760- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3761
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003762- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3763
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003764- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3765 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003766
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003767- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3768 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3769 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3770 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3771 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3772 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003773 attributes.
3774
3775- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3776 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3777 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003778
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003779- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3780 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3781 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003782
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003783- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3784 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3785 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003786 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3787 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3788
3789- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3790 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003791
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003792Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003793-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003794
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003795- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3796 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3797
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003798- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3799 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3800 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3801 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3802
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003803- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3804 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3805 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3806 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3807
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003808 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3809 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3810 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3811 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3812 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3813 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3814 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3815 without losing information).
3816
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003817- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003818 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3819 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3820 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3821 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3822 module).
3823
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003824 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003825 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3826 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3827 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3828 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003829
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003830- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003831 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3832 encoding.
3833
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003834- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3835 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3836
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003837- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003838 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3839
3840- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3841 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3842 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3843 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3844
3845- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3846
3847- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3848 ON, and OFF.
3849
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003850- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3851 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3852
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003853Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003854-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003855
3856- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3857 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3858 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003859
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003860- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3861 been added: -X and -E.
3862
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003863Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003864-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003865
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003866- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3867 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3868
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003869C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003870-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003871
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003872- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3873 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3874 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3875 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3876 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3877
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003878- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3879 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3880 as long) arguments.
3881
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003882- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3883 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3884 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3885 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3886 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3887 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3888
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003889- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3890 input.
3891
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003892New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003893-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003894
3895Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003896-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003897
3898Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003899-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003900
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003901- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3902 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3903 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3904
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003905- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3906 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3907 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003908 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003909
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003910 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3911 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3912 import signal
3913 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003914
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003915 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003916 while 1:
3917 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003918 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003919 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3920 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3921 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3922 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003923
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003924
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003925What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3926===========================
3927
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003928*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3929
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003930Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003931--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003932
3933- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3934 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3935 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3936
3937- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3938 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3939 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3940 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3941 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3942 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3943 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003944
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003945- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003946 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003947 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3948 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3949 associate a docstring with a property.
3950
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003951- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3952 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3953 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3954 other built-in object types.
3955
3956- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3957 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3958 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3959 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3960 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3961
3962- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3963 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3964
3965- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3966 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003967 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003968 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3969 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3970 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3971 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3972 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3973
3974- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3975 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3976 class.
3977
3978- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3979 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3980 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3981 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3982
3983- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3984 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3985 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3986 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3987
3988- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3989 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3990
3991- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3992 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3993 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3994 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3995 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003996 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003997 with the same value as s.
3998
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003999- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4000
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004001Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004002----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004003
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004004- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4005
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004006- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4007 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4008 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4009 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4010 objects.
4011
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004012- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4013 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004014 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4015 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4016
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004017- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4018 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4019 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4020
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004021Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004022-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004023
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004024- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4025 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4026 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4027 by the instances.
4028
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004029- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4030 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4031 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4032
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004033- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4034 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4035 before the entire comparison is complete.
4036
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004037- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4038 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4039 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4040
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004041- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4042 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4043 getwriter().
4044
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004045- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4046 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4047
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004048- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004049 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4050 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4051
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004052- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4053 iterable object.
4054
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004055- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4056 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004057
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004058- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4059 authentication.
4060
4061- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4062 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004063
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004064- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004065 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4066 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4067 a sample driver.)
4068
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004069Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004070-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004071
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004072- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4073 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4074 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4075 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4076 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4077 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4078 kernel has large file support.
4079
4080- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4081 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4082 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4083 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4084 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4085
4086- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4087 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4088 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4089
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004090C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004091-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004092
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004093- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4094 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4095
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004096New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004097-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004098
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004099- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4100 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4101
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004102Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004103-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004104
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004105- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4106 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4107 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4108 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4109 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4110
4111- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4112 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4113 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4114 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4115
4116- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4117 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4118
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004119Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004120-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004121
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004122- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004123 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4124 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004125
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004126
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004127What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4128===========================
4129
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004130*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4131
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004132Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004133----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004134
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004135- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4136 big to represent as a C double.
4137
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004138- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4139 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4140 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4141 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4142 restriction).
4143
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004144- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4145 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4146 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4147 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4148 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4149
4150 >>> dir([])
4151 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4152 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4153 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4154 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4155 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4156 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4157 'reverse', 'sort']
4158
4159 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4160
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004161- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004162 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4163 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4164 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4165 OverflowError exception.
4166
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004167- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004168 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004169 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4170 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4171 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4172 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4173 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004174 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004175 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4176 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4177
4178 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4179 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4180 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4181 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004182
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004183- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004184 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4185 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4186 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4187 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4188 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4189 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4190 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4191 once it is created.
4192
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004193- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4194 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4195 (key, value) pairs.
4196
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004197- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004198 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4199 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4200
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004201- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4202 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4203 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4204 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4205 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004206
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004207- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004208 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4209 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4210
4211 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4212
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004213- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004214 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4215
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004216Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004217-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004218
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004219- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004220 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4221 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004222
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004223- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4224 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4225 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4226 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4227 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4228 in this area anymore).
4229
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004230- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4231 threading.Timer.
4232
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004233- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4234 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4235
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004236- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004237 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4238
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004239- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004240 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4241 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4242 converted to Python longs.
4243
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004244- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004245 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4246
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004247- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4248 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4249 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4250
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004251Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004252-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004253
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004254- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4255 division operators as per PEP 238.
4256
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004257Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004258-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004259
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004260- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4261 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4262 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4263 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4264
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004265C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004266-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004267
4268- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004269
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004270- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4271 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004272 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004273
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004274 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4275 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004276 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004277 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004278
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004279- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004280 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4281 module:
4282
4283 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004284
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004285 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4286 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004287
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004288 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4289 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004290
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004291 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4292
4293 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4294
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004295- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004296 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4297 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4298 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004299
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004300New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004301-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004302
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004303- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4304 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4305 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4306 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4307 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004308
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004309Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004310-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004311
4312Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004313-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004314
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004315- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4316 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4317 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4318 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004319 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4320 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4321 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4322 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4323 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004324
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004325- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004326 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4327
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004328
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004329What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4330===========================
4331
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004332*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4333
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004334Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004335-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004336
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004337- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4338 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4339
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004340- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4341 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4342 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004343
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004344- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4345 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4346 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4347 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004348
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004349- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4350
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004351- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004352
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004353Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004354-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004355
4356- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004357 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004358 the module docstring for details.
4359
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004360Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004361-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004362
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004363- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004364 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4365 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4366 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004367
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004368- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4369 Nick Mathewson.
4370
4371Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004372----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004373
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004374- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4375 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4376 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4377 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4378 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4379 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4380 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4381 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4382
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004383- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4384 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4385 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4386 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4387
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004388- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4389 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4390 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4391 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4392 come a long way).
4393
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004394- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4395 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4396 write filters for these warnings).
4397
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004398- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4399 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4400 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4401 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4402 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4403
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004404- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4405 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4406 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4407 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4408 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4409 older distribution.
4410
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004411Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004412-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004413
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004414- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4415 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004416 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004417
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004418- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4419 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4420 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4421
4422- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4423
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004424- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4425
4426- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4427
4428- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4429
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004430- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004431
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004432- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4433
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004434New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004435-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004436
4437C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004438-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004439
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004440- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4441 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4442 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4443 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4444 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4445 against buffer overruns.
4446
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004447- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004448 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4449 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004450 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4451 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4452 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4453
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004454- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4455 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4456 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4457 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4458 deprecated.
4459
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004460Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004461-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004462
4463- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4464 relevant is found.
4465
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004466
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004467What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004468===========================
4469
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004470*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4471
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004472Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004473----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004474
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004475- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4476 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4477 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4478 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4479 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4480 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4481 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4482 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004483 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004484 repaired.
4485
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004486- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004487 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004488 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4489 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4490 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4491 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4492 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4493 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4494 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4495 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4496
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004497- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4498 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4499 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4500 leading BMO character).
4501
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004502- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4503 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4504 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4505
4506 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4507 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4508 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004509
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004510 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4511 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4512 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4513 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4514 for various simple to use conversions.
4515
4516 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4517 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4518
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004519 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4520 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4521 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4522 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4523 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4524 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4525 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4526 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4527 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4528 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4529 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4530 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4531 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4532 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4533 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004534
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004535- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4536 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4537 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004538 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004539 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004540
4541 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004542 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4543 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4544 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4545 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4546 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004547 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4548 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004549
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004550 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4551 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4552 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004553 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004554
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004555- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4556 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4557 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4558 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4559 floating arithmetic,
4560
4561 x = 9007199254740992.0
4562 print long(x)
4563
4564 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4565 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4566 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4567 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4568 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4569 functions are of good quality).
4570
4571 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4572 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4573 algorithms to break.
4574
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004575- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4576 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4577 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4578 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4579 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4580 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4581 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4582 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4583 order.
4584
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004585- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4586 operation along the most common code paths.
4587
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004588- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4589 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4590
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004591- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4592 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4593 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4594 {}.update(UserDict())
4595
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004596- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4597 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4598 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4599 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4600 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4601 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4602 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4603 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4604
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004605- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004606 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004607
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004608 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004609 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4610 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004611 join() method of strings
4612 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004613 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4614 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004615 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004616 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004617
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004618- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4619 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4620
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004621- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4622 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4623
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004624- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4625 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4626 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4627 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4628
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004629- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4630 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004631 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004632 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4633 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004634
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004635- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4636
4637
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004638Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004639-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004640
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004641- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004642 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004643 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4644 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4645
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004646- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4647 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4648
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004649- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4650 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4651 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4652 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4653
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004654- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4655 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4656 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4657
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004658- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4659
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004660- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4661
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004662- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4663 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4664 that are still imported into string.py).
4665
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004666- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4667
4668- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4669 Now it does.
4670
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004671- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4672
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004673- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4674 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4675 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4676 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4677 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004678 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4679 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004680
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004681- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4682 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4683 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4684 'help(object)'.
4685
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004686Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004687-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004688
4689- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004690 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004691 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4692 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4693
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004694- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004695 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4696 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004697
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004698C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004699-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004700
4701- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4702 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004703
4704----
4705
4706**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**