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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
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +000015- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
16 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
17
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +000018- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
19 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
20
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +000021- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
22 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
23 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
24 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
25 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
26 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
27 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
28 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
29 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
30 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
31 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
32 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
33 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +000034
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +000035- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
36 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
37 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
38 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
39 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
40
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +000041- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
42 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
43
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +000044- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
45 It's writable again.
46
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +000047- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
48 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
49 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
50 preferred, then __iter__ can be overriden.
51
Neil Schemenauer4e3363e2003-06-09 18:42:19 +000052- Creating an attribute on a module (i.e. a global variable created by
53 __setattr__) that causes a builtin name to be shadowed now raises a
54 DeprecationWarning. In future versions of Python the effect may be
55 undefined (in order to allow for optimization of global and builtin
56 name lookups).
57
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +000058Extension modules
59-----------------
60
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +000061- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
62 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
63 unique within a single program run.
64
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +000065- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
66 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
67
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +000068- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
69 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
70
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +000071- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
72 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +000073
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +000074- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
75
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +000076- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
77 Fixes SF bug #730685.
78
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +000079- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
80 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
81 for many BSD-derived systems.
82
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +000083Library
84-------
85
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +000086- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
87 569574).
88
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +000089- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
90 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
91 no more.
92
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +000093- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
94 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
95 module. A function registered with the threading module will
96 be used for all threads it creates.
97
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +000098- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
99 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
100 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000101 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000102
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000103- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
104
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000105- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
106 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
107 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
108 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
109
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000110- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
111 handling.
112
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000113- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
114 __doc__ of data descriptors.
115
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000116- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
117 in socket.py.
118
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000119- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
120
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000121- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
122 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
123 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
124 opener with proxy support.
125
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000126Tools/Demos
127-----------
128
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000129- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
130
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000131- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
132
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000133- diff.py is a new script for print file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff
134 formats. Provides an alternate command line interface to difflib.py.
135
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000136- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
137 files.
138
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000139Build
140-----
141
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000142- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows to specify a
143 different root directory.
144
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000145C API
146-----
147
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000148- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
149 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
150 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
151 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
152 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
153 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
154 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
155 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
156 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
157 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
158
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000159New platforms
160-------------
161
162None this time.
163
164Tests
165-----
166
167- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
168 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
169
170Windows
171-------
172
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +0000173- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
174
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000175- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
176 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
177 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
178 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
179 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
180 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
181 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
182 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
183 that's what it's for.
184
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000185Mac
186---
187
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000188- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
189 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
190 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
191 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +0000192- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
193 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
194- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000195
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000196What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
197================================
198
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000199*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000200
201Core and builtins
202-----------------
203
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000204- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
205 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
206
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000207- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
208 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
209 and cannot be strings).
210
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000211- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
212 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
213 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
214 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
215
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +0000216- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
217 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
218 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
219 Python itself.
220
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +0000221- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
222 the referenced object, if it has one.
223
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +0000224- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
225 the thread started at
226 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
227
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +0000228- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
229 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
230 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
231 placed on a list index.
232
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +0000233- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
234 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
235 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
236 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
237
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000238- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
239 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
240 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
241 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
242 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
243 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
244 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
245
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +0000246- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
247 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
248 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
249 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
250 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
251
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000252- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
253 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000254
255- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
256 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
257 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
258 #693195.)
259
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000260- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
261 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000262
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000263- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000264 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000265 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
266 interpreter executions, would fail.
267
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000268- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000269 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000270 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000271
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000272Extension modules
273-----------------
274
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +0000275- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
276 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
277 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
278 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
279
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +0000280- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
281 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
282
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +0000283- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
284 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
285 and Greg Chapman.)
286
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000287- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
288 recursively.
289
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000290- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000291 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
292 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
293 leaks.
294
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000295- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
296
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000297- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
298 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
299 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
300 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
301 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
302 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
303 #705836.
304
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000305- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzet()
306 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
307
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000308- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
309 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
310 See SF bug #692416.
311
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000312- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
313 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
314
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000315- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
316 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
317 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000318
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000319- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +0000320 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
321 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
322
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000323- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
324 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
325 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
326 timeouts to work properly.
327
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000328Library
329-------
330
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000331- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
332 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
333 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
334 future release.
335
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +0000336- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
337 for querying platform dependent features.
338
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +0000339- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +0000340
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +0000341- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
342 pickle protocol versions.
343
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +0000344- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
345 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
346 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
347
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +0000348- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
349
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +0000350- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
351 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
352 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
353 modules.
354
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +0000355- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
356 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
357 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
358
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000359- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
360 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
361
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000362- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
363 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
364 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
365
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000366- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000367 MS Office extensions.
368
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000369- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
370 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
371
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000372- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
373 execution speed of expressions and statements.
374
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000375- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
376 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
377 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
378 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
379 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
380 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
381
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000382- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
383 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
384 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000385
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +0000386- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
387 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
388 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
389
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +0000390- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
391
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +0000392- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
393 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
394 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
395
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000396Tools/Demos
397-----------
398
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +0000399- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
400 See the module docstring for details.
401
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000402Build
403-----
404
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000405- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
406 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000407
408C API
409-----
410
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000411- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
412
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +0000413- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
414 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
415 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
416
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000417- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
418 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000419
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000420 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
421 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
422 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +0000423
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +0000424- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +0000425 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
426
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +0000427- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
428 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
429 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000430
431New platforms
432-------------
433
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000434None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000435
436Tests
437-----
438
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +0000439- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
440 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000441
442Windows
443-------
444
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +0000445- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
446 function.
447
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +0000448- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
449 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000450
451Mac
452---
453
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000454- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
455 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +0000456
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +0000457- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
458 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000459
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +0000460- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
461 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
462 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000463
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000464- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +0000465 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
466 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000467
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000468- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
469 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000470
471
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000472What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
473=================================
474
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000475*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000476
477Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000478-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000479
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +0000480- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
481 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
482 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
483
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +0000484- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
485 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
486 (SF patch #664376.)
487
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000488- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
489 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
490 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
491 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
492 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
493 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +0000494 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000495
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000496- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
497 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
498 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
499 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000500 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000501
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +0000502- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
503 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
504 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
505 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
506 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
507 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
508 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
509 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
510 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
511 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
512 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
513
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +0000514- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
515 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
516 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
517 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
518 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
519 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
520
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +0000521- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
522 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
523
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +0000524- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
525 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
526 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
527 case.)
528
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +0000529- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
530 passed as unicode strings.
531
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +0000532- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
533 See SF bug #683467.
534
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +0000535- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
536 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
537
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +0000538- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
539
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +0000540- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
541
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +0000542- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
543 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
544 arguments.
545
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +0000546- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
547 See SF bug #667147.
548
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000549- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000550 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000551 See SF bug #676155.
552
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000553- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000554 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000555 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
556 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
557 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
558 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
559 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
560 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000561
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000562Extension modules
563-----------------
564
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000565- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
566 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
567 tp_as_number pointer.
568
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000569- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
570 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
571 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
572 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
573 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
574
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000575- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
576
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +0000577- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
578
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000579- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000580 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000581 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
582 patch #678531.)
583
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000584- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
585 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
586
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000587- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
588 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
589
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000590- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
591
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000592- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
593 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
594 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
595
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000596- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
597
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000598- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
599 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
600
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000601- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000602
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000603- datetime changes:
604
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +0000605 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
606
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000607 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
608 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
609 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
610 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
611 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
612 now.
613
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000614 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000615 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
616 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000617
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000618 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000619 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000620 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
621 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
622 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
623 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000624
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000625 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
626 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
627 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000628 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
629
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000630 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
631 by a later example coded by Guido.
632
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000633 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000634 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
635 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
636 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000637 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
638 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
639
640 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
641 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
642 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
643 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
644 tzinfo subclass instance.
645
646 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
647 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
648 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
649 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
650 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
651 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
652 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
653 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000654
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000655 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
656 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
657 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
658 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
659 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000660 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
661
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000662 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000663
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000664 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
665 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
666 as a naive datetime object.
667
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000668 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
669 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
670 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
671
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000672 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
673 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
674 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
675 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
676 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
677 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
678 comparison.
679
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000680 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
681 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
682 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
683 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000684 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000685
686 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000687
688 and ::
689
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000690 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
691
692 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
693 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
694 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
695 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
696
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000697 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
698 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
699 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
700 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
701 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
702
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000703 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
704 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000705 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
706 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000707
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000708Library
709-------
710
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000711- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
712 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
713
714- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
715 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
716 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
717 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
718 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
719 See PEP 307 for details.
720
721- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
722 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
723
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000724- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
725 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000726 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000727 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
728 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000729 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000730
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000731- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
732 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
733
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000734- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
735 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
736 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
737
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000738- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
739
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000740- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
741 exception.
742
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000743- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
744 class.
745
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000746- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
747 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
748 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
749
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000750- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
751 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
752
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000753- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000754 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
755 See SF bug #659228.
756
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000757- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
758 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
759 See SF patch #651082.
760
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000761- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000762
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000763- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
764 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
765
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000766- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000767 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000768
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +0000769- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
770 DOS paths from other platforms.
771
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000772Tools/Demos
773-----------
774
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000775- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
776 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
777 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
778 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
779 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
780 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
781 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
782 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
783 example:
784
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000785 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
786 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000787
788 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
789
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000790
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000791Build
792-----
793
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000794- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
795 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
796 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000797 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
798
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000799 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
800
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000801- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
802 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
803 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
804 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
805 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
806 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
807 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
808 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
809 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
810
811- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
812 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
813 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
814 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
815
816- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
817 from the Tools/scripts directory.
818
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000819C API
820-----
821
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000822- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
823 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +0000824
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000825- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
826 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
827 tp_as_number pointer.
828
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +0000829- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
830 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
831 (SF #681367)
832
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000833- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
834 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
835 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
836 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000837
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000838Tests
839-----
840
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +0000841- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000842 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
843 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
844 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
845 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
846 pydoc.)
847
848- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
849
850- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000851
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000852Windows
853-------
854
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000855- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
856 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
857 time).
858
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000859- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
860 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
861
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000862- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
863 release without strong cryptography.
864
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000865- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000866 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000867
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000868- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
869 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
870
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000871Mac
872---
873
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000874- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
875 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000876
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000877- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
878 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
879 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000880
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000881- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
882 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000883
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000884- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
885 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
886 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
887 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000888
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000889- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +0000890 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
891 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
892 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000893
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000894
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000895What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000896=================================
897
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000898*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000899
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000900Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000901--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000902
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000903- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
904
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000905- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
906 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000907 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000908 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000909 a different meaning than before.
910
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000911- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000912 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000913 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000914
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000915- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000916 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000917 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000918
919- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
920 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
921 and deallocation.
922
923- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
924 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
925
926- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
927 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
928 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
929 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
930 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
931
932- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
933 now detected by the garbage collector.
934
935- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
936 [SF bug 519621]
937
938- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
939 identifier.
940
941- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
942 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
943 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
944 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
945 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
946 [SF bug 563060]
947
948- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
949 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
950 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
951 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
952 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
953
954- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
955 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
956 not called. [SF bug #537450]
957
958- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
959
960- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
961 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
962 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
963 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
964 state of the slots would be lost.)
965
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000966Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000967-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000968
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000969- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000970 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
971 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
972 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
973 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000974 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
975 Jython 2.1.
976
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000977- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000978 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000979 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
980 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
981 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
982 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
983 these, see PEP 302.
984
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000985- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
986 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
987 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
988
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000989- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
990 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
991 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
992
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000993- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
994 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
995 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
996
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000997- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
998 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
999 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1000 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1001 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1002 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1003 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1004 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1005 releases or implementations.
1006
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001007- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001008 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1009 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001010
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001011- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1012 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1013
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001014- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1015 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1016 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1017
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001018- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1019 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1020
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001021- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1022 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001023 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1024 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001025
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001026- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1027 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1028 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1029 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1030 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1031
1032 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1033 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1034 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1035 pattern.
1036
1037 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1038 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1039 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1040 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1041
1042 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1043 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1044 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1045 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1046 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1047 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1048
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001049- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1050 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1051 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1052 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1053 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1054 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1055 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1056 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001057
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001058- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1059 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1060 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1061 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1062 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001063 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1064 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1065 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1066 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1067 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1068 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1069 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001070
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001071- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1072 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1073
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001074- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1075 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1076 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1077 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1078 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1079 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1080 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1081 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1082 to Zack Weinberg!
1083
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001084- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1085 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1086 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1087 type. This has been fixed now.
1088
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001089- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1090 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1091 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1092
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001093- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1094 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1095 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1096 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1097 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1098 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1099 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1100 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001101 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001102
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001103- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1104 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1105 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001106
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001107- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1108 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1109 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1110 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1111 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1112 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1113 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1114 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001115 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001116 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1117 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1118
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001119- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1120 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1121 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1122 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1123 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1124 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1125 this.)
1126
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001127- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1128 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001129 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001130 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001131 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1132 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001133 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1134 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001135
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001136- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1137 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1138 currently running.
1139
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001140- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1141 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1142 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1143 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1144
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001145- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1146 as directory names.
1147
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001148- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1149 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1150
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001151- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1152 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1153
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001154- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001155 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1156 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001157
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001158- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1159 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1160 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1161 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1162 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1163
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001164- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1165 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1166 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1167 removed.
1168
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001169- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1170 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1171 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1172
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001173- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1174 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1175 to __debug__.
1176
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001177- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1178 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1179 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1180
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001181- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1182 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1183 deprecated now.
1184
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001185- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1186 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1187 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001188
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001189- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1190 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1191 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1192 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1193 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001194
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001195- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1196 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1197
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001198- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1199 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1200 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001201 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001202 is backward compatible.
1203
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001204- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1205 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1206 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1207 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1208 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1209
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001210- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1211 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1212 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1213 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1214 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1215 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001216
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001217- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1218 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1219
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001220- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1221 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1222
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001223- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1224 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1225 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1226 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1227 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1228
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001229- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1230 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1231 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1232
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001233- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001234 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1235
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001236- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1237 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1238 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001239
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001240- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1241 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1242
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001243- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1244 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1245 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1246
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001247- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1248
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001249Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001250-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001251
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001252- Added three operators to the operator module:
1253 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1254 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1255 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1256
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001257- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1258
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001259- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1260 archives.
1261
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001262- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1263 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1264 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1265
1266 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1267
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001268- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1269 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1270 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001271 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001272
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001273- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1274 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1275 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1276 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001277 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1278 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1279 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1280 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001281
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001282- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1283 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001284
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001285- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1286
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001287- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1288 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1289
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001290- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1291 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1292 supported.
1293
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001294- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1295
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001296- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1297 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001298
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001299- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1300 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1301
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001302- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1303
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001304- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1305 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1306
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001307- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1308 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1309 functions but callable type objects.
1310
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001311- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001312 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001313 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001314
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001315- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1316 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001317
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001318- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1319 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001320
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001321- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1322 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1323 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1324 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1325
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001326- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1327 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001328
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001329- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1330 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1331 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1332 and __imul__.
1333
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001334- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001335 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1336 is called.
1337
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001338- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1339 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1340 interpreter was compiled.
1341
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001342- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1343 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1344 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001345 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001346 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1347 1, not 2.
1348
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001349- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1350 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1351 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1352 limit.
1353
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001354- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1355 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1356 bug #623464.
1357
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001358- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1359 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1360 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1361 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1362
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001363Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001364-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001365
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001366- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1367
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001368- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1369 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1370 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1371 with Python 2.3a2.
1372
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001373- os.path exposes getctime.
1374
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001375- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001376 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001377 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001378 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001379 unit tests of floating point results.
1380
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001381- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1382 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1383 has been increased.
1384
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001385- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1386 executed.
1387
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001388- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1389 postinstallation script.
1390
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001391- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1392 test the current module.
1393
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001394- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001395 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1396 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1397 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1398 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1399
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001400- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001401 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001402 Ward's Optik package.
1403
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001404- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1405 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1406 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1407 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1408
1409- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1410 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001411 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001412
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001413- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1414 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1415 shelf are binary pickles.
1416
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001417- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1418 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1419
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001420- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1421 modules are iterators now.
1422
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001423- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1424 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1425 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1426 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1427 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1428 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001429
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001430- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1431 with their entity value.
1432
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001433- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1434
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001435- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1436 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001437
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001438- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1439 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001440 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001441
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001442- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1443 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1444 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1445 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1446 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1447 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1448 main():
1449
1450 import locale
1451 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1452
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001453- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1454 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1455
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001456- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1457 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1458 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1459 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1460 to the new standard.
1461
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001462- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1463 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1464 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1465 an extension to the database.
1466
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001467- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1468 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1469 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1470 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001471 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001472
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001473- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001474 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001475
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001476- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1477 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1478 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1479 bounded integers.
1480
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001481- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1482 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1483 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1484 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1485 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1486 in existence.
1487
1488 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1489 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1490 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
1491 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
1492 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
1493 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
1494
1495 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
1496 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1497 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1498 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1499
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001500- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1501 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1502 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1503
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001504- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1505
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001506- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1507 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1508 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1509 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1510
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001511- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1512 argument.
1513
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001514- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1515 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1516 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1517 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1518 [SF patch 560794].
1519
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001520- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1521 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1522 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001523 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1524 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1525 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001526
1527- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1528 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001529
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001530- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1531 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1532 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1533 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001534
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001535- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1536 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1537 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1538 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1539 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1540
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001541- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001542
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001543- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1544
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001545- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1546 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1547 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1548 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1549 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1550 identical to None.
1551
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001552- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1553 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1554 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1555 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1556 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1557 results now.
1558
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001559- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1560 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1561
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001562- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1563 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1564 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1565 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1566 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1567 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1568 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1569 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1570
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001571- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1572
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001573- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1574 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1575
1576- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1577 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1578 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1579 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1580 and other systems.
1581
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001582- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1583 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1584 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1585 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 +00001586 work well with these.
1587
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001588- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1589
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001590- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001591 connections.
1592
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001593- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1594 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1595 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1596
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001597- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1598 sets
1599
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001600- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1601 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1602 name.
1603
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001604- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1605 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1606 passed in.
1607
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001608- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001609 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001610 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1611 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001612
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001613- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1614
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001615- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1616
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001617- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1618 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1619 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1620
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001621- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1622 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1623 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1624 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001625 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001626
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001627- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001628 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001629 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001630
1631- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1632 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1633 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1634
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001635- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001636 the value of its expression argument.
1637
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001638- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1639 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1640 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1641
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001642- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1643 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1644 skipstone browser was included.
1645
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001646- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1647 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1648
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001649Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001650-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001651
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001652- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1653 names in addition to accepting file names.
1654
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001655- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1656 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1657 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1658 still used and useful.)
1659
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001660- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1661 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1662 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1663 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001664
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001665- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1666 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1667 the generated binary.
1668
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001669Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001670-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001671
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001672- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1673
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001674- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1675 except in the hands of experts.
1676
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001677- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001678 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1679 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1680 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001681
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001682- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1683 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1684 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1685 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1686 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1687 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1688 builds.
1689
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001690- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1691 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1692 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1693 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1694 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1695 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1696 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1697 new type.
1698
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001699- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001700
1701 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1702 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1703 positive infinities.
1704
1705 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1706 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1707 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1708 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1709 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1710 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1711 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1712
1713 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1714
1715 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1716
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001717- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1718 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1719 size of the executable.
1720
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001721- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1722 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1723 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1724 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001725
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001726- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1727
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001728- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1729 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1730 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001731
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001732- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1733 well as Unix.
1734
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001735- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1736 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1737 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1738 modules in the README file for details.
1739
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001740C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001741-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001742
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001743- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1744 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001745 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001746 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001747 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001748
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001749- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1750 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1751 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1752 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1753 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1754 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001755 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001756 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1757 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1758 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1759 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1760 aligned.)
1761
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001762- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1763 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1764 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1765
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001766- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1767 level.
1768
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001769- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1770 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1771 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1772 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1773 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1774
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001775- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1776 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1777 code.
1778
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001779- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1780 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1781 adjusting for negative indices.
1782
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001783- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1784 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1785 object.
1786
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001787- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1788 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1789 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1790
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001791- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1792 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001793
1794- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1795
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001796- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1797 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1798 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1799 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1800
1801- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1802
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001803- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001804
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001805- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001806 without going through the buffer API.
1807
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001808- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001809
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001810- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1811 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1812 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1813 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1814
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001815- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1816 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1817
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001818- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001819 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1820
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001821New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001822-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001823
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001824- OpenVMS is now supported.
1825
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001826- AtheOS is now supported.
1827
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001828- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1829
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001830- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1831
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001832Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001833-----
1834
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001835- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1836 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1837 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001838
1839Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001840-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001841
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001842- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1843 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1844 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1845 bugs.
1846 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001847 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001848 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1849 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001850 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001851
1852- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001853 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001854
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001855- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1856 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1857
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001858- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1859 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001860 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001861 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1862
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001863- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1864 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1865 use files" uninstall option).
1866
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001867- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1868
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001869- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1870 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1871
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001872- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1873 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1874 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1875
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001876- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1877 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1878 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1879 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1880 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001881 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1882 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1883 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001884
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001885- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001886 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001887 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1888 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1889 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1890 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1891 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1892 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1893 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1894 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1895 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1896 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1897 work around.
1898
1899- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1900 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1901 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1902 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1903 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1904 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1905 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1906 specified with O_CREAT too).
1907
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001908Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001909----
1910
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001911- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001912
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00001913- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
1914 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
1915 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
1916
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001917- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1918 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1919 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1920
1921- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1922 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1923 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1924 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1925 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1926 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1927 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1928 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001929
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001930- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1931 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1932 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001933
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001934- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1935 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1936 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1937 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1938 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001939
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001940- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1941 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1942 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001943
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001944- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1945 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001946
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001947- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1948 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1949 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1950 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1951 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001952
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001953- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1954 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1955 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1956
1957- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1958 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1959 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001960
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001961- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1962 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1963 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1964 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001965 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001966
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001967- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1968 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001969
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001970- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1971 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001972
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001973- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00001974 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001975 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1976 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001977
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001978
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001979What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001980===============================
1981
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001982*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1983
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001984Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001985--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001986
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001987- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1988 with a custom metaclass.
1989
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001990Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001991-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001992
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001993- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1994 are proxies.
1995
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001996Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001997-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001998
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001999- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2000 very short strings.
2001
2002- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2003 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2004 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2005 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2006 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2007
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002008Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002009-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002010
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002011- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2012 close or delete time).
2013
2014- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2015 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2016
2017- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2018
2019- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002020 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002021
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002022Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002023-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002024
2025Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002026-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002027
2028C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002029-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002030
2031New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002032-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002033
2034Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002035-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002036
2037Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002038-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002039
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002040- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2041
2042- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2043 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2044
2045- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2046 deleted at process exit time.
2047
2048- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2049 in backslash.
2050
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002051Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002052----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002053
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002054- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2055 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2056 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2057
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002058
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002059What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002060===========================
2061
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002062*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2063
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002064Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002065--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002066
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002067- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2068 been extensively updated. See
2069
2070 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2071
2072 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2073
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002074- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2075 deleted!
2076
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002077- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2078 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2079 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2080 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2081 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2082
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002083- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2084
2085 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2086 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2087
2088 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2089 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2090 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2091 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2092 supported anyway.
2093
2094 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2095 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2096
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002097- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2098 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2099 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2100 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2101 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002102
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002103- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2104 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2105 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2106
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002107Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002108-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002109
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002110- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2111 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2112 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2113 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2114 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2115 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002116 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2117 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2118 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2119 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002120
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002121- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2122 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2123 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2124
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002125Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002126-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002127
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002128- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2129
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002130Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002131-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002132
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002133- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2134 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2135 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2136 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2137 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2138 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2139
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002140- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2141
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002142- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2143
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002144- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2145
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002146- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2147 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2148 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2149
2150- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2151
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002152Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002153-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002154
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002155- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2156 off a search on Google.
2157
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002158Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002159-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002160
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002161- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2162 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2163 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2164 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2165 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2166 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2167 other platforms should do likewise.
2168
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002169- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2170 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2171 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2172
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002173C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002174-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002175
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002176- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2177 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2178 producing key-value pairs.
2179
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002180- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002181 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002182 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2183 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2184 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2185 previously went unchallenged.
2186
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002187New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002188-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002189
2190Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002191-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002192
2193Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002194-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002195
2196Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002197----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002198
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002199- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2200 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002201
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002202- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2203 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2204 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2205 home.
2206
2207
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002208What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002209===========================
2210
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002211*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2212
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002213Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002214--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002215
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002216- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2217 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002218
2219 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002220 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002221
2222 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2223 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002224 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002225 This needs to be documented.
2226
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002227- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2228 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2229
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002230- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2231 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2232 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2233
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002234- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2235 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2236
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002237- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2238 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2239 class forbids it).
2240
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002241- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2242 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2243 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2244
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002245- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2246
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002247Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002248-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002249
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002250- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2251 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002252 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002253
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002254- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2255 (like 1 + '').
2256
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002257Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002258-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002259
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002260- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2261 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2262 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2263 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002264 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002265 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2266
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002267- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2268 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2269 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2270 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2271
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002272- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2273 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002274 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2275 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2276 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002277
2278- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2279 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002280
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002281- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2282 bytes on its input.
2283
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002284Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002285-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002286
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002287- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002288 convenience function.
2289
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002290- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2291 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2292 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002293 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2294 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2295 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2296 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2297 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2298 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002299
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002300- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2301 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2302 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2303 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2304
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002305- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2306 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2307 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2308
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002309- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2310 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2311 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2312 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2313
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002314- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2315 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002316 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002317 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2318 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2319 new -l and -e options.
2320
2321- statcache is now deprecated.
2322
2323- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2324 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002325 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002326 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2327 time properly taken into account.
2328
2329- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2330 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2331 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2332 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2333
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002334Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002335-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002336
2337Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002338-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002339
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002340- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2341 is built with libdb3 if available.
2342
2343- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2344
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002345C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002346-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002347
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002348- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2349 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2350 PySequence_Size().
2351
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002352- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2353
2354- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2355 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2356 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2357
2358- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2359 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2360
2361- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2362 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2363
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002364New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002365-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002366
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002367- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2368 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2369
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002370- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2371 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2372
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002373- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2374
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002375Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002376-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002377
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002378- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2379 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2380
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002381Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002382-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002383
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002384Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002385----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002386
2387- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2388 removed completely in the next release.
2389
2390- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2391 OSX.
2392
2393- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2394 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2395
2396- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2397
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002398
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002399What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002400===========================
2401
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002402*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2403
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002404Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002405--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002406
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002407- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002408 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002409 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002410 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2411 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002412 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2413 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002414 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2415 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002416
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002417- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2418 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2419
2420- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2421 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2422
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002423Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002424-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002425
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002426- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2427 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2428 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2429 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2430 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2431 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2432 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2433 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2434
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002435- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2436 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2437 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2438 example).
2439
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002440- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002441 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002442 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002443 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002444
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002445- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2446 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2447 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002448 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002449
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002450- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2451 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2452 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2453 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2454 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2455 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2456
2457 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2458
2459 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2460
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002461Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002462-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002463
2464- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2465
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002466- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2467
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002468- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2469 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002470
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002471- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2472 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2473 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2474 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2475 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2476 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002477 attributes.
2478
2479- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2480 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2481 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002482
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002483- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2484 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2485 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002486
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002487- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2488 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2489 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002490 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
2491 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
2492
2493- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
2494 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002495
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002496Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002497-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002498
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002499- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2500 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2501
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002502- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2503 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2504 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2505 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2506
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002507- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2508 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2509 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2510 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2511
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002512 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2513 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2514 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2515 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2516 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2517 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2518 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2519 without losing information).
2520
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002521- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002522 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2523 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2524 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2525 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2526 module).
2527
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002528 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002529 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2530 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2531 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2532 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002533
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002534- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002535 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2536 encoding.
2537
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002538- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2539 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2540
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002541- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002542 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2543
2544- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2545 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2546 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2547 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2548
2549- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2550
2551- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2552 ON, and OFF.
2553
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002554- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2555 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2556
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002557Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002558-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002559
2560- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2561 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2562 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002563
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002564- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2565 been added: -X and -E.
2566
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002567Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002568-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002569
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002570- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2571 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2572
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002573C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002574-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002575
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002576- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2577 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2578 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2579 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2580 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2581
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002582- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2583 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2584 as long) arguments.
2585
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002586- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2587 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2588 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2589 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2590 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2591 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2592
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002593- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2594 input.
2595
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002596New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002597-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002598
2599Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002600-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002601
2602Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002603-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002604
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002605- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2606 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2607 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2608
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002609- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2610 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2611 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002612 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002613
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002614 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2615 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2616 import signal
2617 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002618
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002619 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002620 while 1:
2621 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002622 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002623 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2624 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2625 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2626 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002627
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002628
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002629What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2630===========================
2631
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002632*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2633
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002634Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002635--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002636
2637- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2638 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2639 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2640
2641- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2642 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2643 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2644 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2645 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2646 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2647 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002648
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002649- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002650 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002651 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2652 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2653 associate a docstring with a property.
2654
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002655- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2656 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2657 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2658 other built-in object types.
2659
2660- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2661 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2662 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2663 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2664 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2665
2666- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2667 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2668
2669- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2670 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002671 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002672 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2673 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2674 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2675 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2676 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2677
2678- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2679 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2680 class.
2681
2682- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2683 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2684 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2685 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2686
2687- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2688 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2689 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2690 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2691
2692- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2693 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2694
2695- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2696 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2697 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2698 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2699 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002700 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002701 with the same value as s.
2702
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002703- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2704
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002705Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002706----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002707
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002708- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2709
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002710- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2711 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2712 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2713 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2714 objects.
2715
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002716- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2717 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002718 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2719 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2720
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002721- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2722 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2723 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2724
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002725Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002726-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002727
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002728- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2729 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2730 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2731 by the instances.
2732
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002733- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2734 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2735 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2736
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002737- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2738 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2739 before the entire comparison is complete.
2740
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002741- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2742 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2743 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2744
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002745- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2746 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2747 getwriter().
2748
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002749- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2750 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2751
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002752- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002753 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2754 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2755
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002756- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2757 iterable object.
2758
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002759- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2760 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002761
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002762- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2763 authentication.
2764
2765- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2766 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002767
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002768- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002769 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2770 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2771 a sample driver.)
2772
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002773Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002774-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002775
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002776- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2777 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2778 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2779 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2780 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2781 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2782 kernel has large file support.
2783
2784- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2785 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2786 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2787 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2788 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2789
2790- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2791 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2792 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2793
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002794C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002795-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002796
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002797- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2798 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2799
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002800New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002801-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002802
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002803- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2804 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2805
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002806Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002807-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002808
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002809- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2810 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2811 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2812 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2813 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2814
2815- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2816 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2817 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2818 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2819
2820- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2821 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2822
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002823Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002824-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002825
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002826- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002827 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2828 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002829
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002830
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002831What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2832===========================
2833
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002834*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2835
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002836Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002837----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002838
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002839- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2840 big to represent as a C double.
2841
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002842- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2843 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2844 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2845 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2846 restriction).
2847
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002848- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2849 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2850 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2851 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2852 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2853
2854 >>> dir([])
2855 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2856 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2857 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2858 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2859 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2860 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2861 'reverse', 'sort']
2862
2863 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2864
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002865- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002866 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2867 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2868 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2869 OverflowError exception.
2870
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002871- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002872 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002873 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2874 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2875 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2876 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2877 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002878 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002879 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2880 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2881
2882 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2883 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2884 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2885 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002886
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002887- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002888 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2889 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2890 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2891 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2892 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2893 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2894 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2895 once it is created.
2896
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002897- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2898 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2899 (key, value) pairs.
2900
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002901- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002902 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2903 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2904
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002905- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2906 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2907 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2908 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2909 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002910
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002911- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002912 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2913 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2914
2915 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2916
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002917- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002918 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2919
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002920Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002921-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002922
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002923- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002924 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2925 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002926
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002927- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2928 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2929 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2930 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2931 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2932 in this area anymore).
2933
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002934- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2935 threading.Timer.
2936
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002937- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2938 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2939
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002940- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002941 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2942
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002943- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002944 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2945 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2946 converted to Python longs.
2947
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002948- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002949 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2950
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002951- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2952 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2953 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2954
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002955Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002956-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002957
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002958- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2959 division operators as per PEP 238.
2960
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002961Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002962-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002963
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002964- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2965 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2966 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2967 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2968
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002969C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002970-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002971
2972- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002973
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002974- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2975 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002976 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002977
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002978 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2979 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002980 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002981 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002982
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002983- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002984 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2985 module:
2986
2987 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002988
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002989 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2990 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002991
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002992 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2993 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002994
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002995 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2996
2997 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2998
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002999- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003000 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3001 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3002 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003003
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003004New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003005-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003006
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003007- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3008 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3009 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3010 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3011 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003012
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003013Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003014-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003015
3016Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003017-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003018
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003019- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3020 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3021 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3022 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003023 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3024 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3025 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3026 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3027 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003028
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003029- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003030 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3031
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003032
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003033What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3034===========================
3035
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003036*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3037
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003038Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003039-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003040
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003041- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3042 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3043
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003044- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3045 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3046 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003047
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003048- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3049 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3050 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3051 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003052
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003053- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3054
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003055- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003056
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003057Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003058-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003059
3060- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003061 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003062 the module docstring for details.
3063
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003064Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003065-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003066
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003067- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003068 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3069 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3070 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003071
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003072- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3073 Nick Mathewson.
3074
3075Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003076----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003077
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003078- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3079 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3080 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3081 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3082 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3083 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3084 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3085 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3086
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003087- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3088 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3089 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3090 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3091
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003092- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3093 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3094 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3095 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3096 come a long way).
3097
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003098- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3099 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3100 write filters for these warnings).
3101
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003102- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3103 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3104 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3105 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3106 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3107
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003108- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3109 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3110 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3111 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3112 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3113 older distribution.
3114
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003115Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003116-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003117
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003118- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3119 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003120 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003121
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003122- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3123 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3124 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3125
3126- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3127
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003128- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3129
3130- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3131
3132- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3133
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003134- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003135
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003136- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3137
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003138New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003139-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003140
3141C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003142-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003143
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003144- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3145 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3146 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3147 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3148 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3149 against buffer overruns.
3150
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003151- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003152 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3153 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003154 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3155 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3156 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3157
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003158- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3159 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3160 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3161 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3162 deprecated.
3163
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003164Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003165-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003166
3167- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3168 relevant is found.
3169
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003170
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003171What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003172===========================
3173
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003174*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3175
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003176Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003177----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003178
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003179- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3180 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3181 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3182 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3183 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3184 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3185 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3186 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003187 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003188 repaired.
3189
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003190- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003191 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003192 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3193 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3194 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3195 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3196 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3197 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3198 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3199 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3200
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003201- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3202 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3203 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3204 leading BMO character).
3205
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003206- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3207 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3208 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3209
3210 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3211 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3212 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003213
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003214 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3215 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3216 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3217 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3218 for various simple to use conversions.
3219
3220 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3221 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3222
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003223 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3224 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3225 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3226 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3227 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3228 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3229 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3230 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3231 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3232 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3233 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3234 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3235 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3236 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3237 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003238
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003239- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3240 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3241 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003242 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003243 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003244
3245 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003246 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3247 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3248 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3249 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3250 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003251 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3252 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003253
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003254 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3255 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3256 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003257 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003258
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003259- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3260 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3261 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3262 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3263 floating arithmetic,
3264
3265 x = 9007199254740992.0
3266 print long(x)
3267
3268 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3269 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3270 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3271 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3272 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3273 functions are of good quality).
3274
3275 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3276 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3277 algorithms to break.
3278
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003279- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3280 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3281 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3282 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3283 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3284 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3285 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3286 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3287 order.
3288
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003289- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3290 operation along the most common code paths.
3291
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003292- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3293 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3294
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003295- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3296 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3297 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3298 {}.update(UserDict())
3299
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003300- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3301 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3302 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3303 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3304 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3305 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3306 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3307 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3308
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003309- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003310 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003311
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003312 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003313 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3314 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003315 join() method of strings
3316 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003317 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3318 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003319 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003320 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003321
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003322- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3323 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3324
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003325- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3326 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3327
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003328- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3329 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3330 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3331 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3332
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003333- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3334 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003335 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003336 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3337 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003338
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003339- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3340
3341
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003342Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003343-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003344
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003345- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003346 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003347 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3348 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3349
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003350- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3351 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3352
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003353- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3354 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3355 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3356 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3357
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003358- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3359 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3360 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3361
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003362- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3363
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003364- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3365
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003366- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3367 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3368 that are still imported into string.py).
3369
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003370- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3371
3372- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3373 Now it does.
3374
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003375- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3376
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003377- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3378 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3379 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3380 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3381 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003382 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3383 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003384
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003385- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3386 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3387 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3388 'help(object)'.
3389
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003390Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003391-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003392
3393- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003394 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003395 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3396 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3397
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003398- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003399 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3400 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003401
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003402C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003403-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003404
3405- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3406 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003407
3408----
3409
3410**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**