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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +000015- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
16 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
17 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
18 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
19
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000020- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
21 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
22 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
23 length is not known).
24
25- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
26 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +000027 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
28 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000029 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
30
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +000031- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
32 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
33 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
34
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +000035- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
36 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
37 cases.
38
39- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
40 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
41 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
42 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
43 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
44 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
45 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
46 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
47 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
48 a release build.
49
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +000050- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
51 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
52
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000053- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +000054 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000055
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +000056- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
57 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
58 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
59 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
60 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
61 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
62 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
63 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
64 destroyed.
65
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +000066- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
67 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
68 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
69 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
70 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
71 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
72 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
73 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
74
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +000075- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
76 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
77 character other than a space.
78
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +000079- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
80 by the function object or by the method object, the function
81 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
82 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
83 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
84 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
85 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
86 attributes with the same name.
87
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +000088- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
89 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
90 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
91 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
92 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
93 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
94 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
95 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
96 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
97 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
98 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
99 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
100 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
101 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000102
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000103- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
104 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
105 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
106 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
107 This has been repaired.
108
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000109- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
110
111- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
112
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000113- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
114 over a sequence.
115
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000116- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
117 from any iterable.
118
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000119- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
120
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000121- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
122 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
123 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
124 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
125 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
126 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
127 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
128 records with equal keys is unchanged).
129
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000130- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
131 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
132 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
133
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000134- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
135 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
136 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
137 freelist.
138
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000139- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
140 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
141
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000142- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
143 number.
144
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000145- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
146 a TypeError exception.
147
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000148- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
149 820195.
150
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000151- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
152 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
153 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
154
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000155- str and unicode builtin types now have rsplit() method that is
156 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
157 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000158
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000159- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
160 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
161 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
162
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000163Extension modules
164-----------------
165
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000166- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
167 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
168
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000169- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
170 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
171 and pops on either side of the deque.
172
173- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
174 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
175
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000176- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
177 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
178 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
179 other functions that expect a function argument.
180
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000181- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
182
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000183- os.getsid was added.
184
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000185- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
186 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
187 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
188
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000189- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
190
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000191- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
192
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000193- readline.clear_history was added.
194
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000195- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
196
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000197- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
198
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000199- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
200
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000201- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
202
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000203- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
204
205- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
206
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000207- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
208
209- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
210
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000211- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
212 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
213 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
214
215- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
216 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
217 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
218 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
219 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
220 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
221 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
222
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000223- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
224 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
225 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
226 the Unix uniq filter.
227
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000228- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
229 iterators from a single iterable.
230
231- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
232 of raising a TypeError exception.
233
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000234- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
235 as parameter.
236
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000237Library
238-------
239
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000240- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
241 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
242 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
243 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
244 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
245 accordingly.
246
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000247- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
248 decoding standards.
249
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000250- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
251 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
252 called for all requests.
253
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000254- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
255 they are passed to the compiler.
256
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000257- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
258 indent, width and depth.
259
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000260- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
261 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
262
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000263- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
264 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
265
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000266- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
267
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000268- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
269
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000270- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
271
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000272- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
273 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
274
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000275- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
276 for better performance
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000277
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000278- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
279 a string).
280
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000281- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
282
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000283- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
284
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000285- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
286
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000287- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
288
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000289- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
290 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
291 list of fieldnames.
292
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000293- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
294 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
295
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000296- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
297
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000298- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
299 empty lists.
300
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000301- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
302 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
303 and shelves.
304
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000305- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
306 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
307
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000308- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000309 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
310 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000311
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000312- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
313 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000314 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000315
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000316- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000317 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
318 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
319
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000320- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
321 and removed in Py2.4.
322
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000323- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
324
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000325- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
326
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000327Tools/Demos
328-----------
329
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000330- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
331 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
332
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000333- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
334
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000335- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
336 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
337 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
338 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
339
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000340- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
341
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000342- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
343 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
344 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
345 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
346 now.
347
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000348- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
349 in effect
350
351- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
352 C-c C-h
353
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000354- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
355 -d option was given.
356
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000357Build
358-----
359
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000360- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
361 removed.
362
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000363- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
364 supported (see PEP 11).
365
366- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
367
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000368- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
369
370- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
371 (see PEP 11).
372
373- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
374 sizeof(char) must be 1.
375
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000376C API
377-----
378
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000379- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
380 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
381 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
382 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
383 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
384
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000385- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
386 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
387 about 10% faster.
388
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000389- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
390 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
391
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000392- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
393 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
394 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
395 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
396
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000397New platforms
398-------------
399
400Tests
401-----
402
403Windows
404-------
405
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000406- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
407 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
408 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
409 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
410
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000411- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
412 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
413 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
414
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000415Mac
416----
417
418
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000419What's New in Python 2.3 final?
420===============================
421
422*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
423
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000424IDLE
425----
426
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000427- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
428 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
429 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
430 context-menu actions.
431
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000432- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
433 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
434 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
435 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
436 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
437 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
438 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
439 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
440 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
441
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000442
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000443What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
444=============================================
445
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000446*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000447
448Core and builtins
449-----------------
450
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000451- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000452 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000453 comment at the end are still unsupported.
454
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000455Extension modules
456-----------------
457
458- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
459 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
460 than once. This has been fixed.
461
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000462- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
463 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
464 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
465 call.
466
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000467- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
468
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000469Library
470-------
471
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000472- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
473 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
474
475- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
476 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
477 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
478 restored.
479
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000480IDLE
481----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000482
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000483- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000484
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000485Build
486-----
487
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000488- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
489 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
490
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000491C API
492-----
493
494Windows
495-------
496
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000497- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
498 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
499
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000500- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
501
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000502Mac
503---
504
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000505- Various fixes to pimp.
506
507- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
508
509- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
510 more problems than it solves.
511
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000512
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000513What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
514=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000515
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000516*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
517
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000518Core and builtins
519-----------------
520
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000521- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
522 by sys.setcheckinterval().
523
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000524- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
525 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000526 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000527
528- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
529 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
530 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000531 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000532
533- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
534 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000535
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000536- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
537 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
538 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
539
540- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000541 770247.
542
543- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000544
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000545Extension modules
546-----------------
547
548- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
549 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
550
551- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
552
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000553- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
554
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000555- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
556 contained within the _strptime module.
557
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000558- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
559 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
560
561- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000562 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
563
564- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
565 the find_class attribute, if present.
566
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000567- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000568
569 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
570 (SF bug 763298).
571
572 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000573 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
574 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
575 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000576
577 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
578
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000579Library
580-------
581
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000582- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
583
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000584- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
585 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
586 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
587 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
588 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
589 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
590 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
591 or Tester().
592
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000593- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
594 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
595 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
596 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
597 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
598 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
599 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
600 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
601 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000602
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000603 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000604
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000605- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
606 weren't before was an oversight.
607
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000608- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
609 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
610
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000611- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
612 when there are no lines.
613
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000614- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
615 which could occur with Tk 8.4
616
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000617- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
618 to child processes.
619
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000620- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
621
622- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
623
624- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
625 xmlrpclib.
626
627- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
628 responses.
629
630- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
631 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
632
633- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
634 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
635 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
636
637- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
638 used as patterns.
639
640- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
641 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
642 than Tk 8.3.
643
644- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
645
646- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000647
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000648Tools/Demos
649-----------
650
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000651- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
652
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000653- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
654
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000655- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000656
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000657Build
658-----
659
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000660- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
661
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000662- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
663
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000664- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
665 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000666
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000667- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
668 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
669 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000670
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000671C API
672-----
673
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000674- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
675 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
676
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000677Windows
678-------
679
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000680- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
681 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
682 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
683 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
684 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
685 Python exception ::
686
687 thread.error: can't start new thread
688
689 is raised now.
690
691- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
692 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
693 instead of from DLL teardown.
694
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000695Mac
696---
697
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000698- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000699 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000700 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
701 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
702 the executable in the bundle.
703
704- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000705
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000706- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
707
708- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
709 on Panther.
710
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000711What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
712================================
713
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000714*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000715
716Core and builtins
717-----------------
718
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000719- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
720 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
721 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
722 with the -i option.
723
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000724- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
725 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
726
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000727- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
728 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
729
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000730- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
731 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
732 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
733 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
734 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
735 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
736 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
737 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
738 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
739 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
740 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
741 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
742 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000743
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000744- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
745 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
746 embedded in a lambda expression.
747
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000748- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
749 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
750 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
751 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
752 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
753
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000754- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
755 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
756 matches the restriction on classic classes.
757
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000758- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
759 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
760
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000761- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
762 It's writable again.
763
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000764- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
765 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
766 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000767 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000768
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000769- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
770 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
771 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
772
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000773Extension modules
774-----------------
775
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000776- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
777 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
778
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000779- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
780 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
781 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
782 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
783
784- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
785 collection.
786
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000787- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
788 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
789 unique within a single program run.
790
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000791- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
792 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
793
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000794- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
795 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
796
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000797- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
798 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000799
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000800- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
801
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000802- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
803 Fixes SF bug #730685.
804
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000805- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
806 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
807 for many BSD-derived systems.
808
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000809
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000810Library
811-------
812
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000813- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
814 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
815 primary ones:
816
817 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
818 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
819 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
820
821 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
822 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
823 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
824 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
825 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
826 framework features (which doctest lacks).
827
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000828- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
829 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
830 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
831 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
832 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
833 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
834 argument.
835
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000836- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
837 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
838 in the archive.
839
840- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
841 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
842
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000843- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
844 569574).
845
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000846- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
847 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
848 no more.
849
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000850- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
851 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
852 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
853 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
854 code coverage.
855
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000856- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
857 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
858 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000859 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
860 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000861
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000862- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
863 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
864 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000865 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000866
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000867- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
868
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000869- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
870 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
871 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
872 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
873
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000874- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
875 handling.
876
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000877- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
878 __doc__ of data descriptors.
879
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000880- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
881 in socket.py.
882
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000883- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
884
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000885- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
886 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
887 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
888 opener with proxy support.
889
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000890- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
891
892- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
893
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000894Tools/Demos
895-----------
896
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000897- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
898
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000899- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
900
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000901- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
902 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000903
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000904- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
905 files.
906
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000907Build
908-----
909
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000910- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000911 different root directory.
912
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000913C API
914-----
915
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000916- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
917 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
918 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
919 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
920 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
921 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
922 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
923 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
924 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
925 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
926
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000927- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
928 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
929 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
930 from Python.
931
932
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000933New platforms
934-------------
935
936None this time.
937
938Tests
939-----
940
941- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
942 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
943
944Windows
945-------
946
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +0000947- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
948
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000949- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
950 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
951 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
952 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
953 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
954 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
955 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
956 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
957 that's what it's for.
958
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000959Mac
960---
961
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000962- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
963 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
964 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
965 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +0000966- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
967 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
968- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000969
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000970SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
971------------------------------------
972
973430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
974598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
975622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
976661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
977683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
978697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
979713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
980724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
981727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
982729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
983730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
984731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
985732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
986733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
987735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
988740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
989744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
990745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
991747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
992749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
993751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
994753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
995755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
996757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
997760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
998
999
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001000What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1001================================
1002
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001003*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001004
1005Core and builtins
1006-----------------
1007
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001008- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1009 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1010
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001011- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1012 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1013 and cannot be strings).
1014
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001015- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1016 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1017 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1018 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1019
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001020- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1021 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1022 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1023 Python itself.
1024
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001025- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1026 the referenced object, if it has one.
1027
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001028- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1029 the thread started at
1030 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1031
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001032- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1033 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1034 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1035 placed on a list index.
1036
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001037- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1038 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1039 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1040 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1041
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001042- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1043 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1044 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1045 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1046 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1047 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1048 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1049
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001050- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1051 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1052 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1053 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1054 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1055
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001056- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1057 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001058
1059- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1060 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1061 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1062 #693195.)
1063
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001064- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1065 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001066
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001067- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001068 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001069 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1070 interpreter executions, would fail.
1071
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001072- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001073 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001074 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001075
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001076Extension modules
1077-----------------
1078
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001079- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1080 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1081 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1082 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1083
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001084- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1085 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1086
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001087- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1088 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1089 and Greg Chapman.)
1090
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001091- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1092 recursively.
1093
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001094- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001095 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1096 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1097 leaks.
1098
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001099- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1100
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001101- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1102 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1103 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1104 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1105 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1106 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1107 #705836.
1108
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001109- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001110 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1111
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001112- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1113 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1114 See SF bug #692416.
1115
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001116- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1117 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1118
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001119- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1120 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1121 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001122
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001123- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001124 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1125 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1126
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001127- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1128 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1129 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1130 timeouts to work properly.
1131
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001132Library
1133-------
1134
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001135- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1136 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1137 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1138 future release.
1139
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001140- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1141 for querying platform dependent features.
1142
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001143- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001144
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001145- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1146 pickle protocol versions.
1147
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001148- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1149 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1150 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1151
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001152- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1153
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001154- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1155 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1156 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1157 modules.
1158
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001159- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1160 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1161 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1162
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001163- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1164 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1165
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001166- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1167 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1168 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1169
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001170- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001171 MS Office extensions.
1172
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001173- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1174 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1175
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001176- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1177 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1178
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001179- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1180 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1181 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1182 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1183 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1184 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1185
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001186- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1187 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1188 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001189
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001190- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1191 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1192 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1193
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001194- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1195
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001196- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1197 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1198 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1199
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001200Tools/Demos
1201-----------
1202
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001203- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1204 See the module docstring for details.
1205
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001206Build
1207-----
1208
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001209- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1210 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001211
1212C API
1213-----
1214
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001215- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1216
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001217- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1218 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1219 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1220
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001221- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1222 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001223
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001224 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1225 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1226 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001227
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001228- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001229 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1230
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001231- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1232 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1233 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001234
1235New platforms
1236-------------
1237
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001238None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001239
1240Tests
1241-----
1242
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001243- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1244 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001245
1246Windows
1247-------
1248
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001249- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1250 function.
1251
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001252- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1253 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001254
1255Mac
1256---
1257
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001258- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1259 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001260
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001261- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1262 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001263
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001264- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1265 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1266 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001267
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001268- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001269 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1270 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001271
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001272- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1273 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001274
1275
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001276What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1277=================================
1278
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001279*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001280
1281Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001282-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001283
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001284- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1285 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1286 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1287
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001288- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1289 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1290 (SF patch #664376.)
1291
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001292- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1293 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1294 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1295 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1296 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1297 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001298 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001299
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001300- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1301 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1302 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1303 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001304 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001305
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001306- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1307 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1308 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1309 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1310 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1311 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1312 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1313 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1314 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1315 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1316 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1317
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001318- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1319 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1320 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1321 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1322 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1323 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1324
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001325- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1326 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1327
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001328- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1329 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1330 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1331 case.)
1332
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001333- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1334 passed as unicode strings.
1335
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001336- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1337 See SF bug #683467.
1338
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001339- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1340 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1341
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001342- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1343
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001344- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1345
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001346- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1347 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1348 arguments.
1349
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001350- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1351 See SF bug #667147.
1352
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001353- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001354 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001355 See SF bug #676155.
1356
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001357- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001358 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001359 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1360 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1361 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1362 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1363 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1364 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001365
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001366Extension modules
1367-----------------
1368
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001369- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1370 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1371 tp_as_number pointer.
1372
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001373- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1374 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1375 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1376 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1377 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1378
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001379- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1380
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001381- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1382
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001383- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001384 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001385 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1386 patch #678531.)
1387
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001388- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1389 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1390
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001391- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1392 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1393
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001394- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1395
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001396- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1397 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1398 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1399
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001400- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1401
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001402- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1403 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1404
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001405- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001406
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001407- datetime changes:
1408
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001409 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1410
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001411 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1412 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1413 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1414 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1415 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1416 now.
1417
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001418 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001419 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1420 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001421
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001422 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001423 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001424 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1425 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1426 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1427 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001428
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001429 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1430 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1431 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001432 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1433
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001434 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1435 by a later example coded by Guido.
1436
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001437 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001438 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1439 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1440 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001441 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1442 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1443
1444 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1445 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1446 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1447 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1448 tzinfo subclass instance.
1449
1450 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1451 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1452 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1453 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1454 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1455 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1456 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1457 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001458
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001459 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1460 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1461 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1462 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1463 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001464 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1465
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001466 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001467
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001468 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1469 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1470 as a naive datetime object.
1471
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001472 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1473 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1474 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1475
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001476 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1477 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1478 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1479 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1480 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1481 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1482 comparison.
1483
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001484 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1485 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1486 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1487 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001488 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001489
1490 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001491
1492 and ::
1493
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001494 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1495
1496 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1497 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1498 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1499 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1500
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001501 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1502 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1503 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1504 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1505 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1506
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001507 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1508 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001509 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1510 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001511
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001512Library
1513-------
1514
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001515- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1516 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1517
1518- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1519 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1520 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1521 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1522 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1523 See PEP 307 for details.
1524
1525- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1526 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1527
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001528- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1529 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001530 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001531 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1532 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001533 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001534
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001535- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1536 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1537
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001538- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1539 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1540 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1541
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001542- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1543
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001544- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1545 exception.
1546
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001547- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1548 class.
1549
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001550- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1551 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1552 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1553
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001554- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1555 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1556
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001557- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001558 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1559 See SF bug #659228.
1560
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001561- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1562 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1563 See SF patch #651082.
1564
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001565- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001566
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001567- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1568 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1569
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001570- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001571 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001572
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001573- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1574 DOS paths from other platforms.
1575
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001576Tools/Demos
1577-----------
1578
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001579- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1580 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1581 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1582 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1583 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1584 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1585 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1586 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1587 example:
1588
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001589 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1590 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001591
1592 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1593
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001594
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001595Build
1596-----
1597
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001598- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1599 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1600 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001601 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1602
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001603 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1604
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001605- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1606 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1607 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1608 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1609 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1610 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1611 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1612 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1613 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1614
1615- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1616 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1617 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1618 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1619
1620- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1621 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1622
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001623C API
1624-----
1625
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001626- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1627 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001628
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001629- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1630 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1631 tp_as_number pointer.
1632
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001633- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1634 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1635 (SF #681367)
1636
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001637- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1638 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1639 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1640 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001641
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001642Tests
1643-----
1644
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001645- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001646 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1647 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1648 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1649 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1650 pydoc.)
1651
1652- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1653
1654- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001655
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001656Windows
1657-------
1658
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001659- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1660 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1661 time).
1662
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001663- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1664 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1665
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001666- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1667 release without strong cryptography.
1668
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001669- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001670 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001671
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001672- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1673 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1674
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001675Mac
1676---
1677
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001678- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1679 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001680
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001681- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1682 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1683 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001684
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001685- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1686 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001687
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001688- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1689 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1690 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1691 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001692
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001693- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001694 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1695 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1696 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001697
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001698
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001699What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001700=================================
1701
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001702*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001703
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001704Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001705--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001706
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001707- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1708
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001709- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1710 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001711 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001712 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001713 a different meaning than before.
1714
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001715- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001716 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001717 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001718
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001719- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001720 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001721 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001722
1723- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1724 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1725 and deallocation.
1726
1727- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1728 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1729
1730- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1731 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1732 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1733 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1734 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1735
1736- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1737 now detected by the garbage collector.
1738
1739- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1740 [SF bug 519621]
1741
1742- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1743 identifier.
1744
1745- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1746 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1747 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1748 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1749 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1750 [SF bug 563060]
1751
1752- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1753 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1754 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1755 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1756 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1757
1758- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1759 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1760 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1761
1762- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1763
1764- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1765 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1766 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1767 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1768 state of the slots would be lost.)
1769
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001770Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001771-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001772
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001773- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001774 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1775 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1776 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1777 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001778 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1779 Jython 2.1.
1780
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001781- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001782 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001783 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1784 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1785 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1786 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1787 these, see PEP 302.
1788
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001789- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1790 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1791 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1792
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001793- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1794 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1795 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1796
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001797- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1798 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1799 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1800
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001801- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1802 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1803 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1804 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1805 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1806 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1807 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1808 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1809 releases or implementations.
1810
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001811- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001812 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1813 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001814
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001815- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1816 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1817
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001818- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1819 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1820 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1821
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001822- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1823 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1824
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001825- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1826 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001827 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1828 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001829
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001830- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1831 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1832 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1833 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1834 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1835
1836 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1837 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1838 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1839 pattern.
1840
1841 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1842 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1843 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1844 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1845
1846 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1847 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1848 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1849 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1850 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1851 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1852
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001853- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1854 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1855 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1856 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1857 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1858 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1859 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1860 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001861
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001862- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1863 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1864 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1865 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1866 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001867 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1868 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1869 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1870 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1871 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1872 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1873 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001874
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001875- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1876 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1877
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001878- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1879 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1880 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1881 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1882 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1883 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1884 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1885 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1886 to Zack Weinberg!
1887
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001888- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1889 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1890 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1891 type. This has been fixed now.
1892
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001893- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1894 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1895 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1896
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001897- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1898 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1899 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1900 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1901 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1902 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1903 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1904 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001905 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001906
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001907- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1908 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1909 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001910
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001911- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1912 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1913 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1914 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1915 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1916 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1917 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1918 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001919 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001920 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1921 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1922
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001923- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1924 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1925 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1926 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1927 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1928 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1929 this.)
1930
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001931- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1932 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001933 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001934 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001935 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1936 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001937 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1938 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001939
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001940- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1941 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1942 currently running.
1943
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001944- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1945 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1946 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1947 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1948
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001949- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1950 as directory names.
1951
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001952- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1953 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1954
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001955- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1956 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1957
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001958- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001959 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1960 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001961
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001962- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1963 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1964 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1965 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1966 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1967
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001968- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1969 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1970 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1971 removed.
1972
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001973- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1974 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1975 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1976
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001977- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1978 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1979 to __debug__.
1980
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001981- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1982 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1983 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1984
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001985- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1986 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1987 deprecated now.
1988
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001989- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1990 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1991 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001992
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001993- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1994 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1995 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1996 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1997 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001998
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001999- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2000 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2001
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002002- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2003 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2004 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002005 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002006 is backward compatible.
2007
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002008- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2009 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2010 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2011 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2012 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2013
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002014- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2015 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2016 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2017 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2018 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2019 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002020
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002021- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2022 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2023
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002024- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2025 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2026
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002027- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2028 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2029 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2030 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2031 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2032
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002033- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2034 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2035 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2036
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002037- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002038 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2039
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002040- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2041 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2042 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002043
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002044- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2045 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2046
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002047- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2048 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2049 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2050
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002051- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2052
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002053Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002054-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002055
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002056- Added three operators to the operator module:
2057 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2058 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2059 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2060
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002061- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2062
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002063- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2064 archives.
2065
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002066- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2067 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2068 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2069
2070 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2071
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002072- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2073 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2074 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002075 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002076
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002077- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2078 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2079 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2080 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002081 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2082 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2083 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2084 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002085
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002086- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2087 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002088
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002089- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2090
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002091- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2092 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2093
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002094- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2095 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2096 supported.
2097
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002098- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2099
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002100- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2101 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002102
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002103- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2104 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2105
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002106- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2107
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002108- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2109 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2110
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002111- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2112 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2113 functions but callable type objects.
2114
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002115- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002116 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002117 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002118
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002119- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2120 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002121
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002122- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2123 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002124
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002125- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2126 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2127 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2128 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2129
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002130- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2131 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002132
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002133- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2134 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2135 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2136 and __imul__.
2137
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002138- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002139 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2140 is called.
2141
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002142- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2143 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2144 interpreter was compiled.
2145
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002146- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2147 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2148 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002149 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002150 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2151 1, not 2.
2152
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002153- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2154 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2155 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2156 limit.
2157
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002158- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2159 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2160 bug #623464.
2161
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002162- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2163 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2164 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2165 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2166
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002167Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002168-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002169
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002170- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2171
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002172- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2173 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2174 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2175 with Python 2.3a2.
2176
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002177- os.path exposes getctime.
2178
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002179- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002180 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002181 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002182 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002183 unit tests of floating point results.
2184
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002185- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2186 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2187 has been increased.
2188
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002189- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2190 executed.
2191
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002192- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2193 postinstallation script.
2194
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002195- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2196 test the current module.
2197
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002198- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002199 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2200 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2201 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2202 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2203
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002204- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002205 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002206 Ward's Optik package.
2207
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002208- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2209 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2210 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2211 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2212
2213- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2214 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002215 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002216
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002217- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2218 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2219 shelf are binary pickles.
2220
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002221- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2222 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2223
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002224- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2225 modules are iterators now.
2226
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002227- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2228 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2229 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2230 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2231 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2232 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002233
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002234- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2235 with their entity value.
2236
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002237- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2238
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002239- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2240 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002241
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002242- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2243 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002244 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002245
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002246- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2247 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2248 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2249 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2250 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2251 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2252 main():
2253
2254 import locale
2255 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2256
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002257- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2258 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2259
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002260- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2261 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2262 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2263 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2264 to the new standard.
2265
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002266- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2267 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2268 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2269 an extension to the database.
2270
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002271- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2272 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2273 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2274 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002275 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002276
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002277- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002278 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002279
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002280- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2281 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2282 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2283 bounded integers.
2284
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002285- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2286 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2287 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2288 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2289 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2290 in existence.
2291
2292 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2293 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2294 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2295 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2296 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2297 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2298
2299 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2300 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2301 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2302 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2303
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002304- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2305 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2306 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2307
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002308- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2309
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002310- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2311 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2312 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2313 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2314
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002315- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2316 argument.
2317
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002318- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2319 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2320 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2321 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2322 [SF patch 560794].
2323
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002324- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2325 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2326 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002327 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2328 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2329 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002330
2331- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2332 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002333
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002334- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2335 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2336 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2337 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002338
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002339- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2340 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2341 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2342 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2343 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2344
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002345- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002346
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002347- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2348
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002349- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2350 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2351 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2352 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2353 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2354 identical to None.
2355
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002356- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2357 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2358 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2359 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2360 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2361 results now.
2362
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002363- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2364 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2365
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002366- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2367 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2368 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2369 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2370 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2371 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2372 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2373 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2374
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002375- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2376
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002377- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2378 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2379
2380- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2381 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2382 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2383 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2384 and other systems.
2385
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002386- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2387 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2388 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2389 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 +00002390 work well with these.
2391
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002392- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2393
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002394- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002395 connections.
2396
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002397- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2398 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2399 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2400
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002401- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2402 sets
2403
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002404- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2405 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2406 name.
2407
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002408- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2409 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2410 passed in.
2411
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002412- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002413 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002414 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2415 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002416
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002417- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2418
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002419- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2420
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002421- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2422 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2423 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2424
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002425- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2426 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2427 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2428 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002429 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002430
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002431- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002432 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002433 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002434
2435- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2436 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2437 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2438
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002439- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002440 the value of its expression argument.
2441
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002442- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2443 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2444 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2445
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002446- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2447 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2448 skipstone browser was included.
2449
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002450- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2451 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2452
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002453Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002454-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002455
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002456- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2457 names in addition to accepting file names.
2458
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002459- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2460 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2461 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2462 still used and useful.)
2463
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002464- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2465 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2466 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2467 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002468
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002469- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2470 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2471 the generated binary.
2472
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002473Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002474-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002475
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002476- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2477
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002478- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2479 except in the hands of experts.
2480
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002481- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002482 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2483 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2484 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002485
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002486- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2487 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2488 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2489 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2490 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2491 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2492 builds.
2493
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002494- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2495 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2496 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2497 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2498 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2499 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2500 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2501 new type.
2502
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002503- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002504
2505 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2506 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2507 positive infinities.
2508
2509 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2510 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2511 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2512 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2513 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2514 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2515 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2516
2517 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2518
2519 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2520
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002521- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2522 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2523 size of the executable.
2524
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002525- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2526 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2527 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2528 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002529
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002530- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2531
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002532- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2533 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2534 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002535
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002536- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2537 well as Unix.
2538
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002539- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2540 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2541 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2542 modules in the README file for details.
2543
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002544C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002545-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002546
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002547- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2548 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002549 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002550 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002551 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002552
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002553- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2554 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2555 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2556 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2557 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2558 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002559 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002560 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2561 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2562 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2563 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2564 aligned.)
2565
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002566- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2567 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2568 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2569
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002570- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2571 level.
2572
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002573- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2574 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2575 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2576 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2577 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2578
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002579- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2580 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2581 code.
2582
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002583- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2584 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2585 adjusting for negative indices.
2586
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002587- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2588 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2589 object.
2590
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002591- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2592 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2593 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2594
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002595- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2596 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002597
2598- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2599
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002600- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2601 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2602 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2603 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2604
2605- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2606
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002607- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002608
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002609- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002610 without going through the buffer API.
2611
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002612- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002613
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002614- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2615 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2616 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2617 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2618
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002619- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2620 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2621
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002622- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002623 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2624
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002625New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002626-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002627
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002628- OpenVMS is now supported.
2629
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002630- AtheOS is now supported.
2631
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002632- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2633
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002634- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2635
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002636Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002637-----
2638
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002639- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2640 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2641 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002642
2643Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002644-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002645
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002646- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2647 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2648 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2649 bugs.
2650 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002651 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002652 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2653 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002654 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002655
2656- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002657 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002658
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002659- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2660 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2661
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002662- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2663 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002664 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002665 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2666
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002667- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2668 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2669 use files" uninstall option).
2670
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002671- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2672
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002673- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2674 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2675
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002676- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2677 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2678 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2679
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002680- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2681 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2682 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2683 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2684 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002685 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2686 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2687 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002688
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002689- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002690 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002691 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2692 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2693 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2694 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2695 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2696 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2697 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2698 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2699 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2700 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2701 work around.
2702
2703- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2704 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2705 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2706 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2707 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2708 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2709 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2710 specified with O_CREAT too).
2711
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002712Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002713----
2714
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002715- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002716
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002717- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2718 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2719 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2720
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002721- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2722 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2723 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2724
2725- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2726 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2727 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2728 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2729 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2730 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2731 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2732 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002733
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002734- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2735 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2736 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002737
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002738- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2739 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2740 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2741 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2742 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002743
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002744- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2745 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2746 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002747
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002748- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2749 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002750
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002751- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2752 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2753 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2754 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2755 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002756
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002757- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2758 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2759 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2760
2761- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2762 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2763 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002764
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002765- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2766 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2767 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2768 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002769 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002770
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002771- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2772 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002773
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002774- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2775 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002776
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002777- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002778 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002779 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2780 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002781
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002782
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002783What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002784===============================
2785
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002786*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2787
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002788Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002789--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002790
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002791- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2792 with a custom metaclass.
2793
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002794Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002795-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002796
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002797- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2798 are proxies.
2799
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002800Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002801-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002802
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002803- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2804 very short strings.
2805
2806- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2807 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2808 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2809 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2810 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2811
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002812Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002813-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002814
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002815- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2816 close or delete time).
2817
2818- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2819 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2820
2821- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2822
2823- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002824 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002825
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002826Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002827-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002828
2829Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002830-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002831
2832C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002833-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002834
2835New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002836-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002837
2838Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002839-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002840
2841Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002842-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002843
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002844- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2845
2846- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2847 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2848
2849- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2850 deleted at process exit time.
2851
2852- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2853 in backslash.
2854
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002855Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002856----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002857
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002858- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2859 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2860 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2861
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002862
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002863What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002864===========================
2865
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002866*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2867
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002868Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002869--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002870
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002871- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2872 been extensively updated. See
2873
2874 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2875
2876 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2877
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002878- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2879 deleted!
2880
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002881- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2882 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2883 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2884 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2885 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2886
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002887- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2888
2889 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2890 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2891
2892 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2893 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2894 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2895 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2896 supported anyway.
2897
2898 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2899 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2900
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002901- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2902 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2903 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2904 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2905 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002906
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002907- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2908 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2909 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2910
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002911Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002912-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002913
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002914- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2915 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2916 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2917 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2918 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2919 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002920 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2921 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2922 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2923 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002924
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002925- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2926 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2927 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2928
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002929Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002930-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002931
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002932- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2933
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002934Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002935-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002936
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002937- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2938 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2939 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2940 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2941 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2942 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2943
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002944- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2945
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002946- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2947
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002948- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2949
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002950- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2951 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2952 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2953
2954- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2955
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002956Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002957-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002958
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002959- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2960 off a search on Google.
2961
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002962Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002963-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002964
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002965- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2966 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2967 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2968 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2969 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2970 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2971 other platforms should do likewise.
2972
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002973- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2974 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2975 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2976
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002977C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002978-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002979
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002980- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2981 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2982 producing key-value pairs.
2983
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002984- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002985 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002986 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2987 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2988 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2989 previously went unchallenged.
2990
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002991New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002992-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002993
2994Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002995-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002996
2997Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002998-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002999
3000Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003001----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003002
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003003- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3004 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003005
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003006- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3007 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3008 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3009 home.
3010
3011
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003012What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003013===========================
3014
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003015*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3016
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003017Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003018--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003019
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003020- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3021 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003022
3023 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003024 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003025
3026 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3027 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003028 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003029 This needs to be documented.
3030
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003031- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3032 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3033
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003034- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3035 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3036 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3037
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003038- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3039 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3040
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003041- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3042 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3043 class forbids it).
3044
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003045- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3046 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3047 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3048
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003049- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3050
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003051Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003052-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003053
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003054- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3055 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003056 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003057
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003058- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3059 (like 1 + '').
3060
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003061Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003062-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003063
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003064- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3065 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3066 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3067 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003068 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003069 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3070
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003071- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3072 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3073 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3074 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3075
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003076- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3077 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003078 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3079 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3080 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003081
3082- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3083 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003084
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003085- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3086 bytes on its input.
3087
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003088Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003089-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003090
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003091- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003092 convenience function.
3093
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003094- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3095 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3096 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003097 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3098 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3099 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3100 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3101 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3102 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003103
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003104- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3105 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3106 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3107 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3108
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003109- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3110 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3111 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3112
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003113- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3114 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3115 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3116 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3117
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003118- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3119 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003120 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003121 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3122 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3123 new -l and -e options.
3124
3125- statcache is now deprecated.
3126
3127- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3128 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003129 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003130 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3131 time properly taken into account.
3132
3133- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3134 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3135 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3136 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3137
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003138Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003139-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003140
3141Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003142-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003143
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003144- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3145 is built with libdb3 if available.
3146
3147- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3148
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003149C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003150-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003151
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003152- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3153 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3154 PySequence_Size().
3155
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003156- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3157
3158- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3159 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3160 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3161
3162- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3163 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3164
3165- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3166 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3167
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003168New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003169-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003170
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003171- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3172 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3173
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003174- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3175 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3176
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003177- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3178
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003179Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003180-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003181
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003182- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3183 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3184
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003185Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003186-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003187
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003188Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003189----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003190
3191- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3192 removed completely in the next release.
3193
3194- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3195 OSX.
3196
3197- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3198 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3199
3200- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3201
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003202
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003203What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003204===========================
3205
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003206*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3207
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003208Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003209--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003210
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003211- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003212 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003213 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003214 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3215 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003216 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3217 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003218 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3219 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003220
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003221- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3222 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3223
3224- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3225 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3226
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003227Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003228-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003229
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003230- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3231 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3232 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3233 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3234 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3235 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3236 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3237 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3238
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003239- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3240 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3241 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3242 example).
3243
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003244- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003245 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003246 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003247 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003248
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003249- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3250 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3251 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003252 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003253
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003254- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3255 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3256 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3257 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3258 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3259 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3260
3261 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3262
3263 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3264
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003265Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003266-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003267
3268- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3269
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003270- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3271
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003272- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3273 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003274
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003275- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3276 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3277 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3278 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3279 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3280 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003281 attributes.
3282
3283- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3284 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3285 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003286
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003287- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3288 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3289 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003290
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003291- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3292 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3293 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003294 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3295 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3296
3297- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3298 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003299
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003300Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003301-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003302
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003303- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3304 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3305
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003306- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3307 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3308 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3309 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3310
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003311- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3312 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3313 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3314 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3315
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003316 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3317 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3318 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3319 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3320 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3321 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3322 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3323 without losing information).
3324
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003325- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003326 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3327 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3328 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3329 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3330 module).
3331
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003332 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003333 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3334 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3335 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3336 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003337
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003338- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003339 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3340 encoding.
3341
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003342- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3343 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3344
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003345- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003346 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3347
3348- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3349 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3350 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3351 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3352
3353- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3354
3355- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3356 ON, and OFF.
3357
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003358- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3359 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3360
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003361Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003362-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003363
3364- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3365 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3366 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003367
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003368- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3369 been added: -X and -E.
3370
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003371Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003372-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003373
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003374- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3375 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3376
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003377C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003378-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003379
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003380- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3381 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3382 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3383 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3384 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3385
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003386- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3387 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3388 as long) arguments.
3389
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003390- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3391 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3392 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3393 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3394 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3395 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3396
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003397- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3398 input.
3399
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003400New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003401-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003402
3403Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003404-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003405
3406Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003407-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003408
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003409- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3410 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3411 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3412
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003413- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3414 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3415 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003416 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003417
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003418 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3419 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3420 import signal
3421 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003422
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003423 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003424 while 1:
3425 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003426 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003427 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3428 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3429 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3430 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003431
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003432
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003433What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3434===========================
3435
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003436*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3437
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003438Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003439--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003440
3441- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3442 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3443 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3444
3445- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3446 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3447 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3448 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3449 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3450 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3451 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003452
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003453- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003454 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003455 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3456 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3457 associate a docstring with a property.
3458
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003459- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3460 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3461 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3462 other built-in object types.
3463
3464- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3465 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3466 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3467 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3468 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3469
3470- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3471 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3472
3473- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3474 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003475 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003476 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3477 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3478 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3479 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3480 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3481
3482- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3483 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3484 class.
3485
3486- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3487 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3488 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3489 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3490
3491- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3492 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3493 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3494 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3495
3496- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3497 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3498
3499- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3500 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3501 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3502 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3503 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003504 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003505 with the same value as s.
3506
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003507- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3508
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003509Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003510----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003511
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003512- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3513
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003514- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3515 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3516 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3517 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3518 objects.
3519
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003520- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3521 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003522 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3523 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3524
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003525- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3526 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3527 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3528
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003529Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003530-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003531
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003532- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3533 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3534 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3535 by the instances.
3536
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003537- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3538 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3539 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3540
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003541- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3542 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3543 before the entire comparison is complete.
3544
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003545- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3546 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3547 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3548
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003549- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3550 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3551 getwriter().
3552
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003553- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3554 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3555
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003556- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003557 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3558 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3559
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003560- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3561 iterable object.
3562
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003563- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3564 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003565
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003566- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3567 authentication.
3568
3569- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3570 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003571
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003572- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003573 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3574 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3575 a sample driver.)
3576
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003577Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003578-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003579
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003580- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3581 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3582 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3583 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3584 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3585 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3586 kernel has large file support.
3587
3588- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3589 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3590 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3591 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3592 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3593
3594- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3595 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3596 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3597
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003598C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003599-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003600
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003601- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3602 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3603
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003604New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003605-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003606
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003607- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3608 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3609
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003610Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003611-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003612
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003613- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3614 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3615 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3616 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3617 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3618
3619- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3620 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3621 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3622 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3623
3624- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3625 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3626
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003627Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003628-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003629
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003630- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003631 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3632 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003633
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003634
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003635What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3636===========================
3637
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003638*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3639
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003640Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003641----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003642
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003643- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3644 big to represent as a C double.
3645
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003646- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3647 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3648 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3649 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3650 restriction).
3651
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003652- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3653 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3654 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3655 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3656 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3657
3658 >>> dir([])
3659 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3660 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3661 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3662 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3663 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3664 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3665 'reverse', 'sort']
3666
3667 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3668
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003669- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003670 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3671 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3672 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3673 OverflowError exception.
3674
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003675- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003676 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003677 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3678 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3679 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3680 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3681 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003682 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003683 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3684 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3685
3686 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3687 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3688 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3689 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003690
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003691- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003692 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3693 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3694 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3695 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3696 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3697 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3698 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3699 once it is created.
3700
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003701- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3702 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3703 (key, value) pairs.
3704
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003705- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003706 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3707 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3708
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003709- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3710 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3711 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3712 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3713 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003714
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003715- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003716 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3717 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3718
3719 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3720
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003721- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003722 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3723
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003724Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003725-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003726
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003727- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003728 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3729 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003730
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003731- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3732 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3733 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3734 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3735 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3736 in this area anymore).
3737
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003738- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3739 threading.Timer.
3740
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003741- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3742 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3743
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003744- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003745 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3746
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003747- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003748 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3749 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3750 converted to Python longs.
3751
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003752- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003753 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3754
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003755- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3756 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3757 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3758
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003759Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003760-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003761
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003762- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3763 division operators as per PEP 238.
3764
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003765Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003766-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003767
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003768- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3769 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3770 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3771 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3772
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003773C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003774-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003775
3776- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003777
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003778- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3779 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003780 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003781
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003782 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3783 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003784 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003785 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003786
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003787- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003788 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3789 module:
3790
3791 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003792
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003793 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3794 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003795
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003796 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3797 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003798
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003799 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3800
3801 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3802
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003803- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003804 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3805 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3806 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003807
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003808New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003809-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003810
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003811- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3812 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3813 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3814 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3815 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003816
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003817Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003818-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003819
3820Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003821-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003822
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003823- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3824 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3825 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3826 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003827 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3828 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3829 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3830 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3831 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003832
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003833- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003834 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3835
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003836
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003837What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3838===========================
3839
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003840*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3841
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003842Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003843-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003844
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003845- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3846 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3847
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003848- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3849 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3850 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003851
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003852- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3853 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3854 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3855 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003856
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003857- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3858
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003859- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003860
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003861Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003862-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003863
3864- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003865 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003866 the module docstring for details.
3867
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003868Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003869-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003870
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003871- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003872 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3873 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3874 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003875
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003876- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3877 Nick Mathewson.
3878
3879Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003880----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003881
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003882- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3883 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3884 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3885 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3886 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3887 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3888 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3889 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3890
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003891- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3892 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3893 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3894 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3895
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003896- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3897 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3898 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3899 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3900 come a long way).
3901
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003902- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3903 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3904 write filters for these warnings).
3905
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003906- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3907 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3908 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3909 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3910 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3911
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003912- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3913 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3914 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3915 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3916 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3917 older distribution.
3918
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003919Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003920-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003921
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003922- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3923 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003924 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003925
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003926- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3927 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3928 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3929
3930- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3931
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003932- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3933
3934- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3935
3936- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3937
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003938- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003939
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003940- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3941
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003942New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003943-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003944
3945C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003946-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003947
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003948- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3949 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3950 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3951 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3952 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3953 against buffer overruns.
3954
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003955- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003956 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3957 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003958 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3959 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3960 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3961
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003962- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3963 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3964 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3965 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3966 deprecated.
3967
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003968Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003969-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003970
3971- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3972 relevant is found.
3973
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003974
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003975What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003976===========================
3977
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003978*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3979
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003980Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003981----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003982
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003983- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3984 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3985 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3986 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3987 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3988 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3989 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3990 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003991 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003992 repaired.
3993
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003994- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003995 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003996 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3997 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3998 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3999 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4000 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4001 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4002 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4003 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4004
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004005- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4006 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4007 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4008 leading BMO character).
4009
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004010- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4011 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4012 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4013
4014 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4015 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4016 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004017
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004018 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4019 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4020 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4021 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4022 for various simple to use conversions.
4023
4024 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4025 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4026
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004027 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4028 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4029 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4030 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4031 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4032 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4033 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4034 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4035 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4036 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4037 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4038 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4039 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4040 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4041 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004042
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004043- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4044 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4045 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004046 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004047 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004048
4049 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004050 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4051 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4052 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4053 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4054 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004055 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4056 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004057
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004058 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4059 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4060 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004061 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004062
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004063- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4064 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4065 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4066 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4067 floating arithmetic,
4068
4069 x = 9007199254740992.0
4070 print long(x)
4071
4072 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4073 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4074 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4075 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4076 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4077 functions are of good quality).
4078
4079 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4080 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4081 algorithms to break.
4082
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004083- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4084 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4085 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4086 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4087 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4088 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4089 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4090 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4091 order.
4092
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004093- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4094 operation along the most common code paths.
4095
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004096- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4097 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4098
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004099- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4100 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4101 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4102 {}.update(UserDict())
4103
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004104- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4105 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4106 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4107 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4108 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4109 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4110 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4111 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4112
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004113- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004114 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004115
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004116 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004117 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4118 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004119 join() method of strings
4120 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004121 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4122 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004123 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004124 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004125
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004126- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4127 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4128
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004129- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4130 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4131
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004132- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4133 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4134 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4135 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4136
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004137- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4138 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004139 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004140 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4141 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004142
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004143- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4144
4145
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004146Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004147-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004148
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004149- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004150 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004151 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4152 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4153
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004154- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4155 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4156
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004157- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4158 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4159 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4160 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4161
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004162- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4163 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4164 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4165
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004166- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4167
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004168- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4169
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004170- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4171 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4172 that are still imported into string.py).
4173
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004174- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4175
4176- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4177 Now it does.
4178
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004179- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4180
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004181- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4182 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4183 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4184 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4185 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004186 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4187 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004188
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004189- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4190 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4191 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4192 'help(object)'.
4193
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004194Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004195-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004196
4197- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004198 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004199 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4200 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4201
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004202- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004203 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4204 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004205
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004206C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004207-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004208
4209- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4210 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004211
4212----
4213
4214**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**