blob: 6e8cae69bdb426dd106ae8d8ca11c0a141b51d7e [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +000015- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
16 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
17
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +000018- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
19 It's writable again.
20
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +000021- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
22 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
23 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
24 preferred, then __iter__ can be overriden.
25
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +000026Extension modules
27-----------------
28
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +000029- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
30
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +000031- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
32 Fixes SF bug #730685.
33
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +000034- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
35 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
36 for many BSD-derived systems.
37
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +000038Library
39-------
40
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +000041- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
42 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
43 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
44 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
45
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +000046- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
47 handling.
48
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +000049- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
50 __doc__ of data descriptors.
51
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +000052- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
53 in socket.py.
54
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +000055Tools/Demos
56-----------
57
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +000058- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
59 files.
60
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +000061Build
62-----
63
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +000064- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows to specify a
65 different root directory.
66
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +000067C API
68-----
69
70New platforms
71-------------
72
73None this time.
74
75Tests
76-----
77
78- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
79 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
80
81Windows
82-------
83
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +000084- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
85 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
86 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
87 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
88 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
89 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
90 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
91 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
92 that's what it's for.
93
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +000094Mac
95---
96
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +000097- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
98 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
99 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
100 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000101
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000102What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
103================================
104
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000105*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000106
107Core and builtins
108-----------------
109
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000110- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
111 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
112
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000113- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
114 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
115 and cannot be strings).
116
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000117- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
118 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
119 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
120 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
121
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +0000122- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
123 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
124 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
125 Python itself.
126
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +0000127- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
128 the referenced object, if it has one.
129
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +0000130- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
131 the thread started at
132 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
133
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +0000134- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
135 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
136 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
137 placed on a list index.
138
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +0000139- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
140 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
141 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
142 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
143
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000144- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
145 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
146 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
147 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
148 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
149 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
150 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
151
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +0000152- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
153 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
154 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
155 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
156 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
157
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000158- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
159 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000160
161- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
162 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
163 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
164 #693195.)
165
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000166- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
167 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000168
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000169- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000170 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000171 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
172 interpreter executions, would fail.
173
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000174- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000175 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000176 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000177
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000178Extension modules
179-----------------
180
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +0000181- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
182 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
183 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
184 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
185
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +0000186- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
187 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
188
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +0000189- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
190 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
191 and Greg Chapman.)
192
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000193- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
194 recursively.
195
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000196- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000197 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
198 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
199 leaks.
200
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000201- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
202
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000203- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
204 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
205 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
206 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
207 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
208 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
209 #705836.
210
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000211- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzet()
212 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
213
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000214- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
215 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
216 See SF bug #692416.
217
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000218- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
219 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
220
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000221- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
222 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
223 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000224
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000225- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +0000226 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
227 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
228
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000229- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
230 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
231 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
232 timeouts to work properly.
233
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000234Library
235-------
236
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000237- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
238 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
239 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
240 future release.
241
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +0000242- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
243 for querying platform dependent features.
244
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +0000245- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +0000246
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +0000247- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
248 pickle protocol versions.
249
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +0000250- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
251 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
252 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
253
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +0000254- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
255
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +0000256- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
257 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
258 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
259 modules.
260
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +0000261- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
262 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
263 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
264
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000265- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
266 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
267
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000268- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
269 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
270 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
271
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000272- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000273 MS Office extensions.
274
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000275- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
276 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
277
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000278- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
279 execution speed of expressions and statements.
280
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000281- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
282 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
283 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
284 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
285 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
286 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
287
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000288- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
289 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
290 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000291
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +0000292- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
293 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
294 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
295
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +0000296- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
297
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +0000298- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
299 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
300 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
301
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000302Tools/Demos
303-----------
304
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +0000305- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
306 See the module docstring for details.
307
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000308Build
309-----
310
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000311- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
312 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000313
314C API
315-----
316
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000317- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
318
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +0000319- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
320 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
321 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
322
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000323- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
324 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000325
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000326 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
327 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
328 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +0000329
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +0000330- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +0000331 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
332
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +0000333- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
334 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
335 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000336
337New platforms
338-------------
339
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000340None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000341
342Tests
343-----
344
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +0000345- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
346 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000347
348Windows
349-------
350
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +0000351- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
352 function.
353
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +0000354- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
355 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000356
357Mac
358---
359
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000360- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
361 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +0000362
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +0000363- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
364 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000365
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +0000366- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
367 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
368 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000369
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000370- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +0000371 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
372 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000373
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000374- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
375 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000376
377
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000378What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
379=================================
380
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000381*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000382
383Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000384-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000385
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +0000386- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
387 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
388 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
389
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +0000390- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
391 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
392 (SF patch #664376.)
393
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000394- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
395 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
396 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
397 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
398 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
399 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +0000400 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000401
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000402- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
403 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
404 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
405 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000406 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000407
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +0000408- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
409 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
410 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
411 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
412 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
413 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
414 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
415 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
416 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
417 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
418 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
419
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +0000420- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
421 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
422 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
423 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
424 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
425 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
426
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +0000427- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
428 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
429
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +0000430- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
431 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
432 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
433 case.)
434
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +0000435- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
436 passed as unicode strings.
437
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +0000438- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
439 See SF bug #683467.
440
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +0000441- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
442 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
443
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +0000444- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
445
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +0000446- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
447
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +0000448- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
449 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
450 arguments.
451
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +0000452- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
453 See SF bug #667147.
454
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000455- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000456 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000457 See SF bug #676155.
458
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000459- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000460 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000461 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
462 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
463 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
464 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
465 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
466 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000467
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000468Extension modules
469-----------------
470
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000471- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
472 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
473 tp_as_number pointer.
474
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000475- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
476 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
477 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
478 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
479 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
480
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000481- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
482
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +0000483- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
484
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000485- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000486 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000487 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
488 patch #678531.)
489
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000490- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
491 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
492
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000493- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
494 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
495
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000496- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
497
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000498- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
499 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
500 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
501
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000502- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
503
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000504- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
505 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
506
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000507- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000508
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000509- datetime changes:
510
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +0000511 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
512
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000513 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
514 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
515 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
516 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
517 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
518 now.
519
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000520 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000521 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
522 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000523
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000524 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000525 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000526 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
527 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
528 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
529 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000530
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000531 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
532 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
533 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000534 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
535
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000536 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
537 by a later example coded by Guido.
538
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000539 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000540 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
541 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
542 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000543 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
544 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
545
546 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
547 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
548 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
549 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
550 tzinfo subclass instance.
551
552 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
553 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
554 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
555 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
556 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
557 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
558 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
559 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000560
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000561 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
562 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
563 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
564 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
565 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000566 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
567
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000568 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000569
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000570 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
571 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
572 as a naive datetime object.
573
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000574 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
575 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
576 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
577
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000578 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
579 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
580 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
581 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
582 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
583 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
584 comparison.
585
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000586 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
587 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
588 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
589 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000590 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000591
592 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000593
594 and ::
595
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000596 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
597
598 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
599 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
600 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
601 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
602
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000603 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
604 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
605 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
606 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
607 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
608
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000609 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
610 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000611 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
612 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000613
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000614Library
615-------
616
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000617- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
618 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
619
620- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
621 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
622 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
623 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
624 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
625 See PEP 307 for details.
626
627- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
628 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
629
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000630- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
631 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000632 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000633 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
634 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000635 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000636
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000637- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
638 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
639
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000640- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
641 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
642 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
643
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000644- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
645
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000646- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
647 exception.
648
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000649- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
650 class.
651
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000652- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
653 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
654 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
655
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000656- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
657 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
658
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000659- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000660 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
661 See SF bug #659228.
662
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000663- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
664 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
665 See SF patch #651082.
666
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000667- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000668
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000669- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
670 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
671
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000672- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000673 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000674
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +0000675- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
676 DOS paths from other platforms.
677
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000678Tools/Demos
679-----------
680
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000681- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
682 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
683 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
684 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
685 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
686 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
687 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
688 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
689 example:
690
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000691 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
692 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000693
694 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
695
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000696
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000697Build
698-----
699
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000700- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
701 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
702 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000703 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
704
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000705 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
706
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000707- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
708 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
709 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
710 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
711 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
712 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
713 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
714 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
715 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
716
717- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
718 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
719 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
720 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
721
722- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
723 from the Tools/scripts directory.
724
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000725C API
726-----
727
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000728- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
729 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +0000730
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000731- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
732 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
733 tp_as_number pointer.
734
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +0000735- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
736 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
737 (SF #681367)
738
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000739- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
740 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
741 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
742 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000743
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000744Tests
745-----
746
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +0000747- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000748 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
749 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
750 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
751 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
752 pydoc.)
753
754- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
755
756- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000757
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000758Windows
759-------
760
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000761- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
762 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
763 time).
764
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000765- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
766 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
767
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000768- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
769 release without strong cryptography.
770
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000771- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000772 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000773
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000774- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
775 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
776
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000777Mac
778---
779
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000780- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
781 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000782
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000783- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
784 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
785 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000786
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000787- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
788 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000789
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000790- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
791 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
792 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
793 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000794
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000795- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +0000796 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
797 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
798 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000799
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000800
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000801What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000802=================================
803
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000804*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000805
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000806Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000807--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000808
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000809- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
810
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000811- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
812 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000813 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000814 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000815 a different meaning than before.
816
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000817- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000818 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000819 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000820
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000821- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000822 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000823 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000824
825- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
826 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
827 and deallocation.
828
829- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
830 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
831
832- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
833 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
834 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
835 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
836 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
837
838- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
839 now detected by the garbage collector.
840
841- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
842 [SF bug 519621]
843
844- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
845 identifier.
846
847- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
848 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
849 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
850 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
851 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
852 [SF bug 563060]
853
854- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
855 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
856 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
857 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
858 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
859
860- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
861 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
862 not called. [SF bug #537450]
863
864- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
865
866- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
867 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
868 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
869 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
870 state of the slots would be lost.)
871
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000872Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000873-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000874
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000875- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000876 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
877 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
878 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
879 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000880 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
881 Jython 2.1.
882
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000883- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000884 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000885 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
886 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
887 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
888 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
889 these, see PEP 302.
890
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000891- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
892 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
893 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
894
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000895- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
896 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
897 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
898
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000899- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
900 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
901 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
902
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000903- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
904 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
905 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
906 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
907 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
908 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
909 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
910 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
911 releases or implementations.
912
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000913- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000914 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
915 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000916
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000917- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
918 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
919
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000920- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
921 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
922 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
923
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000924- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
925 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
926
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000927- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
928 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000929 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
930 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000931
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000932- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
933 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
934 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
935 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
936 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
937
938 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
939 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
940 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
941 pattern.
942
943 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
944 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
945 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
946 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
947
948 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
949 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
950 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
951 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
952 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
953 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
954
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000955- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
956 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
957 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
958 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
959 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
960 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
961 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
962 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000963
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000964- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
965 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
966 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
967 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
968 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000969 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
970 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
971 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
972 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
973 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
974 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
975 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000976
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000977- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
978 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
979
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000980- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
981 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
982 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
983 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
984 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
985 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
986 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
987 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
988 to Zack Weinberg!
989
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000990- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
991 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
992 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
993 type. This has been fixed now.
994
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000995- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
996 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
997 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
998
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000999- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1000 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1001 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1002 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1003 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1004 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1005 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1006 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001007 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001008
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001009- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1010 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1011 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001012
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001013- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1014 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1015 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1016 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1017 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1018 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1019 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1020 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001021 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001022 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1023 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1024
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001025- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1026 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1027 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1028 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1029 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1030 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1031 this.)
1032
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001033- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1034 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001035 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001036 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001037 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1038 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001039 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1040 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001041
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001042- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1043 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1044 currently running.
1045
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001046- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1047 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1048 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1049 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1050
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001051- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1052 as directory names.
1053
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001054- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1055 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1056
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001057- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1058 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1059
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001060- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001061 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1062 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001063
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001064- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1065 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1066 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1067 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1068 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1069
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001070- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1071 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1072 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1073 removed.
1074
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001075- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1076 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1077 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1078
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001079- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1080 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1081 to __debug__.
1082
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001083- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1084 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1085 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1086
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001087- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1088 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1089 deprecated now.
1090
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001091- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1092 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1093 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001094
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001095- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1096 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1097 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1098 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1099 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001100
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001101- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1102 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1103
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001104- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1105 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1106 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001107 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001108 is backward compatible.
1109
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001110- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1111 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1112 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1113 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1114 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1115
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001116- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1117 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1118 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1119 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1120 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1121 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001122
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001123- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1124 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1125
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001126- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1127 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1128
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001129- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1130 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1131 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1132 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1133 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1134
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001135- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1136 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1137 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1138
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001139- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001140 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1141
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001142- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1143 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1144 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001145
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001146- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1147 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1148
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001149- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1150 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1151 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1152
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001153- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1154
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001155Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001156-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001157
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001158- Added three operators to the operator module:
1159 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1160 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1161 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1162
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001163- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1164
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001165- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1166 archives.
1167
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001168- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1169 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1170 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1171
1172 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1173
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001174- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1175 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1176 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001177 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001178
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001179- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1180 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1181 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1182 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001183 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1184 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1185 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1186 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001187
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001188- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1189 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001190
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001191- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1192
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001193- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1194 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1195
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001196- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1197 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1198 supported.
1199
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001200- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1201
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001202- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1203 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001204
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001205- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1206 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1207
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001208- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1209
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001210- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1211 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1212
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001213- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1214 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1215 functions but callable type objects.
1216
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001217- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001218 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001219 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001220
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001221- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1222 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001223
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001224- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1225 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001226
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001227- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1228 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1229 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1230 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1231
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001232- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1233 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001234
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001235- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1236 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1237 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1238 and __imul__.
1239
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001240- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001241 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1242 is called.
1243
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001244- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1245 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1246 interpreter was compiled.
1247
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001248- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1249 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1250 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001251 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001252 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1253 1, not 2.
1254
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001255- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1256 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1257 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1258 limit.
1259
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001260- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1261 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1262 bug #623464.
1263
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001264- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1265 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1266 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1267 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1268
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001269Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001270-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001271
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001272- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1273
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001274- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1275 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1276 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1277 with Python 2.3a2.
1278
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001279- os.path exposes getctime.
1280
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001281- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001282 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001283 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001284 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001285 unit tests of floating point results.
1286
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001287- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1288 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1289 has been increased.
1290
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001291- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1292 executed.
1293
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001294- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1295 postinstallation script.
1296
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001297- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1298 test the current module.
1299
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001300- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001301 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1302 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1303 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1304 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1305
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001306- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001307 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001308 Ward's Optik package.
1309
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001310- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1311 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1312 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1313 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1314
1315- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1316 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001317 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001318
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001319- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1320 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1321 shelf are binary pickles.
1322
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001323- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1324 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1325
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001326- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1327 modules are iterators now.
1328
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001329- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1330 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1331 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1332 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1333 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1334 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001335
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001336- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1337 with their entity value.
1338
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001339- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1340
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001341- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1342 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001343
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001344- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1345 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001346 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001347
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001348- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1349 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1350 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1351 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1352 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1353 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1354 main():
1355
1356 import locale
1357 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1358
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001359- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1360 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1361
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001362- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1363 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1364 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1365 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1366 to the new standard.
1367
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001368- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1369 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1370 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1371 an extension to the database.
1372
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001373- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1374 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1375 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1376 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001377 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001378
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001379- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001380 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001381
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001382- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1383 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1384 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1385 bounded integers.
1386
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001387- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1388 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1389 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1390 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1391 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1392 in existence.
1393
1394 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1395 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1396 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
1397 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
1398 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
1399 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
1400
1401 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
1402 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1403 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1404 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1405
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001406- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1407 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1408 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1409
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001410- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1411
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001412- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1413 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1414 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1415 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1416
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001417- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1418 argument.
1419
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001420- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1421 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1422 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1423 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1424 [SF patch 560794].
1425
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001426- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1427 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1428 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001429 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1430 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1431 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001432
1433- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1434 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001435
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001436- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1437 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1438 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1439 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001440
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001441- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1442 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1443 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1444 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1445 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1446
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001447- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001448
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001449- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1450
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001451- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1452 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1453 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1454 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1455 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1456 identical to None.
1457
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001458- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1459 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1460 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1461 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1462 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1463 results now.
1464
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001465- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1466 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1467
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001468- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1469 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1470 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1471 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1472 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1473 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1474 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1475 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1476
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001477- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1478
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001479- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1480 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1481
1482- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1483 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1484 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1485 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1486 and other systems.
1487
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001488- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1489 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1490 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1491 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 +00001492 work well with these.
1493
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001494- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1495
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001496- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001497 connections.
1498
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001499- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1500 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1501 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1502
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001503- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1504 sets
1505
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001506- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1507 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1508 name.
1509
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001510- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1511 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1512 passed in.
1513
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001514- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001515 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001516 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1517 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001518
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001519- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1520
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001521- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1522
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001523- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1524 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1525 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1526
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001527- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1528 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1529 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1530 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001531 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001532
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001533- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001534 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001535 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001536
1537- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1538 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1539 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1540
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001541- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001542 the value of its expression argument.
1543
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001544- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1545 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1546 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1547
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001548- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1549 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1550 skipstone browser was included.
1551
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001552- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1553 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1554
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001555Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001556-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001557
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001558- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1559 names in addition to accepting file names.
1560
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001561- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1562 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1563 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1564 still used and useful.)
1565
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001566- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1567 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1568 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1569 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001570
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001571- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1572 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1573 the generated binary.
1574
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001575Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001576-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001577
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001578- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1579
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001580- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1581 except in the hands of experts.
1582
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001583- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001584 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1585 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1586 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001587
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001588- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1589 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1590 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1591 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1592 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1593 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1594 builds.
1595
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001596- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1597 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1598 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1599 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1600 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1601 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1602 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1603 new type.
1604
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001605- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001606
1607 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1608 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1609 positive infinities.
1610
1611 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1612 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1613 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1614 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1615 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1616 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1617 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1618
1619 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1620
1621 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1622
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001623- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1624 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1625 size of the executable.
1626
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001627- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1628 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1629 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1630 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001631
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001632- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1633
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001634- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1635 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1636 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001637
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001638- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1639 well as Unix.
1640
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001641- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1642 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1643 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1644 modules in the README file for details.
1645
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001646C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001647-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001648
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001649- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1650 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001651 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001652 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001653 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001654
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001655- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1656 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1657 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1658 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1659 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1660 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001661 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001662 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1663 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1664 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1665 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1666 aligned.)
1667
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001668- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1669 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1670 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1671
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001672- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1673 level.
1674
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001675- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1676 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1677 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1678 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1679 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1680
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001681- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1682 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1683 code.
1684
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001685- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1686 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1687 adjusting for negative indices.
1688
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001689- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1690 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1691 object.
1692
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001693- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1694 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1695 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1696
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001697- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1698 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001699
1700- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1701
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001702- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1703 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1704 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1705 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1706
1707- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1708
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001709- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001710
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001711- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001712 without going through the buffer API.
1713
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001714- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001715
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001716- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1717 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1718 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1719 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1720
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001721- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1722 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1723
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001724- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001725 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1726
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001727New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001728-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001729
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001730- OpenVMS is now supported.
1731
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001732- AtheOS is now supported.
1733
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001734- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1735
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001736- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1737
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001738Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001739-----
1740
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001741- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1742 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1743 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001744
1745Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001746-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001747
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001748- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1749 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1750 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1751 bugs.
1752 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001753 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001754 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1755 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001756 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001757
1758- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001759 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001760
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001761- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1762 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1763
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001764- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1765 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001766 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001767 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1768
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001769- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1770 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1771 use files" uninstall option).
1772
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001773- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1774
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001775- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1776 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1777
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001778- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1779 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1780 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1781
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001782- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1783 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1784 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1785 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1786 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001787 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1788 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1789 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001790
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001791- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001792 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001793 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1794 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1795 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1796 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1797 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1798 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1799 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1800 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1801 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1802 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1803 work around.
1804
1805- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1806 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1807 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1808 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1809 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1810 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1811 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1812 specified with O_CREAT too).
1813
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001814Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001815----
1816
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001817- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001818
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00001819- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
1820 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
1821 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
1822
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001823- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1824 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1825 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1826
1827- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1828 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1829 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1830 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1831 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1832 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1833 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1834 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001835
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001836- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1837 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1838 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001839
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001840- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1841 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1842 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1843 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1844 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001845
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001846- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1847 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1848 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001849
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001850- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1851 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001852
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001853- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1854 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1855 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1856 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1857 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001858
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001859- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1860 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1861 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1862
1863- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1864 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1865 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001866
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001867- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1868 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1869 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1870 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001871 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001872
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001873- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1874 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001875
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001876- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1877 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001878
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001879- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00001880 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001881 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1882 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001883
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001884
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001885What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001886===============================
1887
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001888*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1889
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001890Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001891--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001892
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001893- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1894 with a custom metaclass.
1895
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001896Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001897-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001898
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001899- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1900 are proxies.
1901
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001902Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001903-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001904
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001905- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1906 very short strings.
1907
1908- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1909 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1910 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1911 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1912 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1913
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001914Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001915-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001916
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001917- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1918 close or delete time).
1919
1920- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1921 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1922
1923- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1924
1925- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001926 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001927
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001928Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001929-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001930
1931Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001932-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001933
1934C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001935-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001936
1937New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001938-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001939
1940Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001941-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001942
1943Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001944-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001945
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001946- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1947
1948- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1949 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1950
1951- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1952 deleted at process exit time.
1953
1954- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1955 in backslash.
1956
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001957Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001958----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001959
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001960- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1961 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1962 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1963
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001964
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001965What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001966===========================
1967
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001968*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1969
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001970Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001971--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001972
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001973- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1974 been extensively updated. See
1975
1976 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1977
1978 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1979
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001980- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1981 deleted!
1982
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001983- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1984 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1985 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1986 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1987 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1988
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001989- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1990
1991 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1992 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1993
1994 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1995 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1996 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1997 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1998 supported anyway.
1999
2000 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2001 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2002
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002003- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2004 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2005 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2006 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2007 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002008
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002009- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2010 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2011 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2012
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002013Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002014-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002015
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002016- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2017 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2018 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2019 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2020 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2021 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002022 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2023 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2024 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2025 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002026
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002027- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2028 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2029 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2030
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002031Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002032-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002033
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002034- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2035
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002036Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002037-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002038
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002039- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2040 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2041 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2042 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2043 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2044 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2045
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002046- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2047
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002048- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2049
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002050- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2051
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002052- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2053 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2054 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2055
2056- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2057
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002058Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002059-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002060
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002061- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2062 off a search on Google.
2063
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002064Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002065-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002066
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002067- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2068 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2069 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2070 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2071 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2072 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2073 other platforms should do likewise.
2074
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002075- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2076 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2077 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2078
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002079C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002080-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002081
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002082- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2083 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2084 producing key-value pairs.
2085
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002086- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002087 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002088 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2089 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2090 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2091 previously went unchallenged.
2092
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002093New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002094-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002095
2096Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002097-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002098
2099Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002100-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002101
2102Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002103----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002104
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002105- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2106 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002107
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002108- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2109 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2110 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2111 home.
2112
2113
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002114What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002115===========================
2116
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002117*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2118
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002119Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002120--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002121
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002122- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2123 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002124
2125 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002126 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002127
2128 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2129 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002130 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002131 This needs to be documented.
2132
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002133- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2134 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2135
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002136- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2137 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2138 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2139
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002140- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2141 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2142
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002143- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2144 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2145 class forbids it).
2146
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002147- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2148 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2149 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2150
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002151- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2152
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002153Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002154-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002155
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002156- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2157 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002158 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002159
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002160- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2161 (like 1 + '').
2162
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002163Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002164-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002165
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002166- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2167 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2168 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2169 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002170 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002171 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2172
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002173- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2174 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2175 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2176 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2177
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002178- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2179 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002180 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2181 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2182 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002183
2184- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2185 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002186
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002187- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2188 bytes on its input.
2189
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002190Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002191-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002192
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002193- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002194 convenience function.
2195
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002196- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2197 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2198 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002199 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2200 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2201 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2202 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2203 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2204 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002205
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002206- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2207 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2208 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2209 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2210
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002211- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2212 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2213 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2214
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002215- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2216 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2217 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2218 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2219
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002220- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2221 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002222 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002223 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2224 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2225 new -l and -e options.
2226
2227- statcache is now deprecated.
2228
2229- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2230 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002231 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002232 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2233 time properly taken into account.
2234
2235- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2236 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2237 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2238 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2239
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002240Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002241-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002242
2243Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002244-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002245
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002246- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2247 is built with libdb3 if available.
2248
2249- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2250
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002251C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002252-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002253
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002254- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2255 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2256 PySequence_Size().
2257
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002258- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2259
2260- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2261 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2262 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2263
2264- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2265 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2266
2267- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2268 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2269
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002270New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002271-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002272
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002273- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2274 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2275
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002276- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2277 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2278
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002279- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2280
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002281Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002282-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002283
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002284- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2285 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2286
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002287Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002288-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002289
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002290Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002291----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002292
2293- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2294 removed completely in the next release.
2295
2296- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2297 OSX.
2298
2299- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2300 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2301
2302- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2303
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002304
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002305What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002306===========================
2307
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002308*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2309
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002310Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002311--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002312
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002313- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002314 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002315 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002316 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2317 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002318 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2319 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002320 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2321 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002322
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002323- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2324 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2325
2326- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2327 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2328
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002329Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002330-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002331
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002332- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2333 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2334 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2335 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2336 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2337 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2338 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2339 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2340
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002341- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2342 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2343 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2344 example).
2345
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002346- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002347 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002348 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002349 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002350
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002351- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2352 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2353 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002354 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002355
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002356- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2357 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2358 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2359 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2360 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2361 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2362
2363 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2364
2365 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2366
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002367Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002368-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002369
2370- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2371
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002372- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2373
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002374- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2375 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002376
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002377- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2378 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2379 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2380 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2381 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2382 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002383 attributes.
2384
2385- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2386 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2387 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002388
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002389- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2390 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2391 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002392
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002393- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2394 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2395 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002396 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
2397 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
2398
2399- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
2400 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002401
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002402Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002403-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002404
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002405- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2406 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2407
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002408- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2409 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2410 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2411 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2412
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002413- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2414 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2415 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2416 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2417
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002418 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2419 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2420 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2421 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2422 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2423 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2424 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2425 without losing information).
2426
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002427- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002428 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2429 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2430 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2431 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2432 module).
2433
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002434 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002435 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2436 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2437 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2438 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002439
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002440- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002441 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2442 encoding.
2443
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002444- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2445 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2446
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002447- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002448 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2449
2450- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2451 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2452 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2453 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2454
2455- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2456
2457- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2458 ON, and OFF.
2459
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002460- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2461 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2462
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002463Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002464-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002465
2466- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2467 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2468 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002469
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002470- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2471 been added: -X and -E.
2472
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002473Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002474-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002475
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002476- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2477 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2478
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002479C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002480-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002481
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002482- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2483 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2484 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2485 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2486 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2487
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002488- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2489 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2490 as long) arguments.
2491
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002492- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2493 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2494 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2495 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2496 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2497 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2498
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002499- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2500 input.
2501
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002502New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002503-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002504
2505Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002506-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002507
2508Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002509-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002510
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002511- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2512 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2513 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2514
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002515- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2516 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2517 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002518 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002519
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002520 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2521 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2522 import signal
2523 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002524
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002525 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002526 while 1:
2527 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002528 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002529 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2530 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2531 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2532 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002533
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002534
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002535What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2536===========================
2537
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002538*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2539
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002540Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002541--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002542
2543- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2544 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2545 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2546
2547- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2548 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2549 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2550 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2551 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2552 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2553 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002554
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002555- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002556 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002557 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2558 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2559 associate a docstring with a property.
2560
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002561- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2562 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2563 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2564 other built-in object types.
2565
2566- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2567 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2568 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2569 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2570 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2571
2572- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2573 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2574
2575- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2576 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002577 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002578 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2579 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2580 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2581 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2582 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2583
2584- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2585 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2586 class.
2587
2588- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2589 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2590 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2591 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2592
2593- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2594 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2595 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2596 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2597
2598- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2599 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2600
2601- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2602 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2603 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2604 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2605 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002606 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002607 with the same value as s.
2608
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002609- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2610
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002611Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002612----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002613
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002614- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2615
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002616- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2617 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2618 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2619 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2620 objects.
2621
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002622- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2623 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002624 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2625 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2626
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002627- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2628 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2629 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2630
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002631Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002632-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002633
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002634- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2635 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2636 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2637 by the instances.
2638
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002639- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2640 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2641 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2642
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002643- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2644 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2645 before the entire comparison is complete.
2646
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002647- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2648 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2649 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2650
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002651- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2652 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2653 getwriter().
2654
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002655- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2656 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2657
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002658- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002659 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2660 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2661
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002662- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2663 iterable object.
2664
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002665- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2666 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002667
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002668- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2669 authentication.
2670
2671- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2672 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002673
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002674- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002675 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2676 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2677 a sample driver.)
2678
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002679Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002680-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002681
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002682- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2683 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2684 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2685 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2686 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2687 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2688 kernel has large file support.
2689
2690- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2691 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2692 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2693 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2694 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2695
2696- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2697 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2698 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2699
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002700C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002701-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002702
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002703- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2704 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2705
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002706New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002707-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002708
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002709- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2710 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2711
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002712Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002713-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002714
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002715- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2716 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2717 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2718 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2719 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2720
2721- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2722 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2723 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2724 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2725
2726- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2727 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2728
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002729Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002730-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002731
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002732- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002733 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2734 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002735
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002736
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002737What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2738===========================
2739
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002740*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2741
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002742Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002743----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002744
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002745- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2746 big to represent as a C double.
2747
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002748- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2749 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2750 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2751 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2752 restriction).
2753
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002754- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2755 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2756 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2757 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2758 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2759
2760 >>> dir([])
2761 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2762 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2763 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2764 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2765 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2766 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2767 'reverse', 'sort']
2768
2769 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2770
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002771- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002772 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2773 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2774 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2775 OverflowError exception.
2776
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002777- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002778 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002779 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2780 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2781 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2782 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2783 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002784 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002785 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2786 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2787
2788 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2789 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2790 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2791 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002792
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002793- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002794 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2795 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2796 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2797 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2798 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2799 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2800 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2801 once it is created.
2802
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002803- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2804 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2805 (key, value) pairs.
2806
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002807- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002808 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2809 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2810
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002811- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2812 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2813 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2814 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2815 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002816
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002817- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002818 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2819 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2820
2821 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2822
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002823- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002824 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2825
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002826Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002827-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002828
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002829- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002830 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2831 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002832
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002833- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2834 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2835 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2836 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2837 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2838 in this area anymore).
2839
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002840- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2841 threading.Timer.
2842
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002843- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2844 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2845
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002846- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002847 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2848
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002849- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002850 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2851 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2852 converted to Python longs.
2853
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002854- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002855 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2856
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002857- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2858 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2859 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2860
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002861Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002862-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002863
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002864- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2865 division operators as per PEP 238.
2866
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002867Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002868-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002869
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002870- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2871 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2872 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2873 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2874
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002875C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002876-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002877
2878- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002879
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002880- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2881 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002882 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002883
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002884 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2885 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002886 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002887 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002888
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002889- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002890 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2891 module:
2892
2893 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002894
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002895 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2896 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002897
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002898 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2899 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002900
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002901 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2902
2903 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2904
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002905- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002906 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2907 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2908 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002909
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002910New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002911-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002912
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002913- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2914 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2915 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2916 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2917 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002918
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002919Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002920-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002921
2922Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002923-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002924
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002925- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2926 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2927 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2928 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002929 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2930 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2931 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2932 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2933 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002934
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002935- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002936 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2937
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002938
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002939What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2940===========================
2941
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002942*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2943
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002944Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002945-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002946
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002947- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2948 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2949
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002950- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2951 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2952 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002953
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002954- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2955 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2956 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2957 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002958
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002959- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2960
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002961- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002962
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002963Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002964-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002965
2966- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002967 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002968 the module docstring for details.
2969
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002970Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002971-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002972
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002973- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002974 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2975 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2976 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002977
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002978- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2979 Nick Mathewson.
2980
2981Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002982----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002983
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002984- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2985 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2986 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2987 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2988 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2989 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2990 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2991 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2992
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002993- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2994 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2995 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2996 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2997
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002998- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2999 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3000 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3001 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3002 come a long way).
3003
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003004- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3005 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3006 write filters for these warnings).
3007
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003008- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3009 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3010 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3011 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3012 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3013
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003014- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3015 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3016 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3017 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3018 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3019 older distribution.
3020
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003021Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003022-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003023
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003024- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3025 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003026 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003027
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003028- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3029 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3030 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3031
3032- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3033
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003034- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3035
3036- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3037
3038- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3039
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003040- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003041
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003042- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3043
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003044New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003045-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003046
3047C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003048-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003049
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003050- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3051 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3052 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3053 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3054 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3055 against buffer overruns.
3056
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003057- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003058 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3059 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003060 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3061 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3062 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3063
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003064- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3065 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3066 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3067 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3068 deprecated.
3069
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003070Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003071-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003072
3073- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3074 relevant is found.
3075
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003076
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003077What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003078===========================
3079
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003080*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3081
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003082Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003083----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003084
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003085- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3086 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3087 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3088 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3089 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3090 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3091 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3092 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003093 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003094 repaired.
3095
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003096- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003097 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003098 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3099 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3100 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3101 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3102 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3103 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3104 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3105 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3106
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003107- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3108 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3109 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3110 leading BMO character).
3111
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003112- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3113 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3114 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3115
3116 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3117 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3118 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003119
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003120 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3121 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3122 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3123 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3124 for various simple to use conversions.
3125
3126 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3127 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3128
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003129 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3130 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3131 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3132 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3133 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3134 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3135 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3136 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3137 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3138 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3139 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3140 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3141 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3142 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3143 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003144
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003145- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3146 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3147 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003148 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003149 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003150
3151 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003152 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3153 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3154 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3155 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3156 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003157 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3158 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003159
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003160 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3161 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3162 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003163 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003164
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003165- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3166 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3167 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3168 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3169 floating arithmetic,
3170
3171 x = 9007199254740992.0
3172 print long(x)
3173
3174 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3175 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3176 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3177 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3178 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3179 functions are of good quality).
3180
3181 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3182 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3183 algorithms to break.
3184
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003185- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3186 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3187 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3188 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3189 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3190 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3191 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3192 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3193 order.
3194
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003195- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3196 operation along the most common code paths.
3197
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003198- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3199 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3200
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003201- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3202 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3203 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3204 {}.update(UserDict())
3205
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003206- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3207 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3208 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3209 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3210 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3211 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3212 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3213 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3214
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003215- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003216 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003217
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003218 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003219 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3220 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003221 join() method of strings
3222 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003223 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3224 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003225 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003226 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003227
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003228- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3229 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3230
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003231- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3232 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3233
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003234- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3235 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3236 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3237 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3238
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003239- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3240 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003241 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003242 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3243 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003244
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003245- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3246
3247
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003248Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003249-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003250
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003251- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003252 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003253 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3254 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3255
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003256- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3257 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3258
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003259- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3260 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3261 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3262 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3263
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003264- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3265 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3266 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3267
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003268- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3269
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003270- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3271
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003272- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3273 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3274 that are still imported into string.py).
3275
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003276- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3277
3278- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3279 Now it does.
3280
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003281- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3282
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003283- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3284 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3285 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3286 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3287 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003288 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3289 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003290
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003291- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3292 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3293 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3294 'help(object)'.
3295
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003296Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003297-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003298
3299- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003300 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003301 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3302 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3303
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003304- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003305 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3306 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003307
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003308C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003309-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003310
3311- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3312 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003313
3314----
3315
3316**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**