blob: 8efa6d2e8bfe972b423083bfd3db2af21a0010f9 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
7What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1|beta 3)
8=====================================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +000015- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
16 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
17 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
18
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +000019
20Extension Modules
21-----------------
22
23...
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +000024
25Library
26-------
27
28- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
29 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
30 raised is re-raised.
31
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +000032- Patch 1061679: Added `__all__` to pickletools.py.
33
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +000034Build
35-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +000036
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +000037- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
38 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
39 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +000040
41C API
42-----
43
44...
45
46Documentation
47-------------
48
49...
50
51Tests
52-----
53
54...
55
56Windows
57-------
58
59...
60
61Mac
62---
63
64...
65
66New platforms
67-------------
68
69...
70
71Tools/Demos
72-----------
73
74...
75
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +000076
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +000077What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
78================================
79
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +000080*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +000081
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +000082License
83-------
84
85The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
86is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
87changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
88Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
89intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
90durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
91the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
92License::
93
94 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
95
96says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
97to Python 2.1.1.
98
99The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
100License Version 2.
101
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000102Core and builtins
103-----------------
104
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000105- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
106 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
107 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
108 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
109 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
110 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
111 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
112 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
113 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
114 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
115
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000116- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000117
118Extension Modules
119-----------------
120
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000121- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
122 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
123 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
124 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000125
126Library
127-------
128
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000129- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
130 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
131 returned.
132
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000133- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
134
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000135- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
136 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
137
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000138- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
139
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000140- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
141 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000142
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000143- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
144
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000145- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
146
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000147- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000148 the source code is updated and reloaded.
149
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000150Build
151-----
152
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000153- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000154
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000155What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
156================================
157
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000158*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000159
160Core and builtins
161-----------------
162
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000163- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000164 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
165
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000166- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
167 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
168 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
169 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
170
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000171- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
172 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
173
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000174- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
175 constant.
176
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000177- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
178 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
179 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
180 large), and to anomalies such as
181 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
182 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
183 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
184 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000185
186Extension modules
187-----------------
188
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000189- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
190 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000191 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
192 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
193 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000194
195Library
196-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000197
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000198- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000199 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000200 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
201 --swig-cpp.
202
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000203- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
204 it is set.
205
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000206- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000207
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000208- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
209 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
210 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
211 Closes bug #1039270.
212
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000213- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000214
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000215 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000216 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
217 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
218 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
219 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
220 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
221 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
222 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
223 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
224 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
225 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
226 + Updates to documentation.
227
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000228- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
229 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
230 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
231 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
232
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000233- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000234
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000235- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
236 applications should use the getmember function.
237
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000238- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
239
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000240- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
241 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
242 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
243 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
244 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
245 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
246 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
247 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
248 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
249
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000250- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
251 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000252 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000253
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000254- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
255 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
256 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
257 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
258 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
259 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
260 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
261 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000262
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000263- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
264 the new public features (of which there are many).
265
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000266- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000267 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
268 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
269 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
270 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000271 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000272
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000273- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
274
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000275- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
276 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
277 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
278 options.
279
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000280- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
281 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
282 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
283 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
284 conditions under which non-string values work.
285
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000286Build
287-----
288
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000289- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
290 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
291 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
292
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000293- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
294 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
295 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
296 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
297 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000298
299C API
300-----
301
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000302- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
303 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
304
305- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
306
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000307- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
308 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
309 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
310 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
311 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
312 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
313 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
314 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
315 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
316
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000317- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
318
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000319- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
320 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
321 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000322
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000323Tests
324-----
325
326- test__locale ported to unittest
327
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000328Mac
329---
330
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000331- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
332 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
333 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000334
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000335Tools/Demos
336-----------
337
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000338- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
339 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
340 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
341 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
342 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000343
344
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000345What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
346=================================
347
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000348*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000349
350Core and builtins
351-----------------
352
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000353- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000354 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
355
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000356- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
357 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
358 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
359 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
360 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
361 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
362 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
363 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000364 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
365 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
366 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
367 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
368 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000369
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000370- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
371 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
372 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
373 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
374 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
375
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000376- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
377
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000378- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
379 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
380
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000381- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
382 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
383 modified the list.
384
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000385- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
386 functions is now writable.
387
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000388- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
389 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
390 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
391 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
392
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000393- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
394 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
395 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
396 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
397 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000398
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000399- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
400 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
401
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000402Extension modules
403-----------------
404
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000405- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
406
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000407- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
408 data.
409
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000410- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
411 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
412 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
413 supposed to have been truncated away.
414
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000415- Added socket.socketpair().
416
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000417- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
418 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
419
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000420- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000421 versions of Python, have now been removed.
422
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000423Library
424-------
425
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000426- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000427 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000428
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000429- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
430 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
431
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000432- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
433 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
434
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000435- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
436
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000437- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
438 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000439
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000440- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
441 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
442
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000443- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
444
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000445- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
446
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000447- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
448
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000449- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
450 Percivall.
451
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000452- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
453 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
454
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000455- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
456 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
457 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000458 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000459
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000460- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
461 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
462 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
463 and exponent.
464
465- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
466
467- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
468 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
469 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
470
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000471- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
472 to the readline module.
473
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000474- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000475 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
476 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000477
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000478- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
479 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
480 contains symlinks.
481
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000482- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
483 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
484
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000485- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
486 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
487 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
488
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000489- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
490 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
491 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
492 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
493 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
494 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
495 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
496 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
497 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
498 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
499 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
500 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
501 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
502
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000503- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
504
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000505Tools/Demos
506-----------
507
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000508- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
509 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
510
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000511- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
512
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000513Build
514-----
515
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000516- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
517 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
518 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
519 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
520 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
521 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
522 plans to do so.
523
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000524- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
525 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
526
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000527- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
528 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
529
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000530- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
531 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
532
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000533- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
534 GNU/k*BSD systems.
535
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000536- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
537 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
538
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000539C API
540-----
541
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000542..
543
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000544Documentation
545-------------
546
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000547- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
548 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
549
550- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
551 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
552 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000553
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000554New platforms
555-------------
556
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000557- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
558
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000559Tests
560-----
561
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000562..
563
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000564Windows
565-------
566
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000567- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
568 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
569 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
570 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
571 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
572 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
573 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
574 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
575 the problem.
576
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000577Mac
578---
579
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000580..
581
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000582
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000583What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
584=================================
585
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000586*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000587
588Core and builtins
589-----------------
590
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000591- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
592 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
593 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
594 sensitive code.
595
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000596- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000597 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000598
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000599 @staticmethod
600 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000601
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000602 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000603
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000604- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
605 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
606 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
607 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
608 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
609 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
610 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
611 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
612 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
613 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
614 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
615
616 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
617 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
618 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
619 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
620 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
621 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
622 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
623
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000624- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
625 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
626
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000627- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000628 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000629
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000630- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000631 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000632 which was missing for no apparent reason.
633
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000634- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000635 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
636 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
637
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000638- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
639 types that support garbage collection.
640
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000641- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
642
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000643- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
644 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
645 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
646 Jython.
647
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000648- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
649
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000650- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
651 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
652
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000653- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
654 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
655 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000656
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000657- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
658 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
659 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
660
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000661Extension modules
662-----------------
663
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000664- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
665
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000666Library
667-------
668
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000669- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
670 TIS-620
671
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000672- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
673 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
674 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
675 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
676 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
677 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
678 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
679 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
680 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
681 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
682
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000683- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
684
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000685- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
686 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
687 same as when the argument is omitted).
688 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
689
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000690- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
691
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000692- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
693 schemes are offered.
694
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000695- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
696
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000697- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
698 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
699 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
700
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000701- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
702
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000703- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
704 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
705
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000706- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
707 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
708 when dummy_threading is being used.
709
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000710- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
711 from a tarfile.
712
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000713- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000714 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000715
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000716- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
717 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
718 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
719 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
720
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000721- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
722 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
723
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000724- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
725 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
726 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
727 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
728 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
729 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
730 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
731 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
732 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
733 by some other method in progress).
734
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000735- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
736 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
737 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000738
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000739- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
740
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000741- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
742 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
743 AM Kuchling.
744
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000745- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
746 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
747 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
748
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000749- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
750 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
751 instead of unsigned.
752
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000753- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000754 no longer part of the public API.
755
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000756- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
757 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
758 string methods of the same name).
759
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000760- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000761 SF patch 945642.
762
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000763- doctest unittest integration improvements:
764
765 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
766
767 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
768 DocTestSuites.
769
770- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
771 that provide thread-local data.
772
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000773- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
774 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
775
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000776- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
777
778- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
779 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
780 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
781
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000782- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
783
784 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
785 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
786 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000787
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000788 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
789 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
790 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
791 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
792
793 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
794 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
795
796 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
797 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
798 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
799 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
800
801 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
802 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
803 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
804 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
805 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
806
807 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
808 wrapping help output.
809
810 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
811 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
812 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000813
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000814C API
815-----
816
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000817- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
818 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
819 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
820 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
821 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
822 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
823 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
824 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
825 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
826 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
827 its visible semantics have not changed.
828
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000829- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
830 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
831
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000832Documentation
833-------------
834
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000835- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000836
837 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000838 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000839
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000840 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000841
842 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
843
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000844- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000845
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000846Tests
847-----
848
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000849- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000850 platforms that use the Makefile.
851
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000852- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
853 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
854 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
855
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000856
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000857What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
858=================================
859
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000860*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000861
862Core and builtins
863-----------------
864
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000865- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
866 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
867 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
868 objects now (one object instead of three).
869
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000870- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
871 Windows DLLs.
872
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000873- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
874 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000875
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000876- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
877 a new .pyc magic.
878
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000879- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
880 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
881 be there.
882
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000883- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
884 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
885 the LC_NUMERIC category.
886
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000887- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
888 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
889 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
890
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000891- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
892
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000893- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
894 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
895 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000896
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000897- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
898 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
899
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000900- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
901
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000902- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000903 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000904
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000905- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
906
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000907- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
908
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000909- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
910 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
911
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000912- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
913 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
914 Fixes bug #858016 .
915
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000916- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
917 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
918 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
919
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000920- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
921 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
922 improves their performance (about 35%).
923
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000924- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
925 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
926 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
927
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000928- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
929 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
930 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
931 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
932
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000933- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
934 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
935 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
936 length is not known).
937
938- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
939 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000940 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
941 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000942 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
943
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000944- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
945 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
946
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000947- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
948 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
949 keyword arguments.
950
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000951- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
952 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
953 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
954
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000955- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
956 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
957 cases.
958
959- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
960 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
961 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
962 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
963 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
964 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
965 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
966 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
967 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
968 a release build.
969
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000970- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
971 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
972
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000973- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000974 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000975
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000976- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
977 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
978 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
979 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
980 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
981 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
982 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
983 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
984 destroyed.
985
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000986- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
987 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
988 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
989 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
990 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
991 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
992 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
993 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
994
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000995- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
996 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
997 character other than a space.
998
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000999- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1000 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1001 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1002 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1003 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1004 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1005 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1006 attributes with the same name.
1007
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001008- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1009 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1010 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1011 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1012 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1013 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1014 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1015 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1016 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1017 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1018 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1019 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1020 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1021 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001022
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001023- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1024 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1025 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1026 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1027 This has been repaired.
1028
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001029- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1030
1031- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1032
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001033- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1034 over a sequence.
1035
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001036- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001037 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001038
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001039- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1040
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001041- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1042 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1043 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1044 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1045 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1046 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1047 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1048 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1049
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001050- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1051 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1052 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1053
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001054- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1055 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1056 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1057 freelist.
1058
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001059- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1060 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1061
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001062- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1063 number.
1064
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001065- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1066 a TypeError exception.
1067
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001068- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1069 820195.
1070
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001071- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1072 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1073 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1074
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001075- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001076 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1077 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001078
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001079- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1080 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1081 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1082
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001083- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1084 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001085 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001086
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001087- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001088 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1089 the first call.
1090
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001091
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001092Extension modules
1093-----------------
1094
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001095- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1096 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1097
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001098- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1099 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1100 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1101 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1102 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1103 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1104 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001105
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001106- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1107
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001108- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1109
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001110- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1111 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1112
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001113- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1114 fewer false positives.
1115
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001116- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1117 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1118
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001119- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001120 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1121
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001122- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001123 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001124 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001125 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1126 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001127
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001128- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1129 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1130 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1131 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1132
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001133- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1134 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1135 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1136 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1137 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1138 #897625.
1139
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001140- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1141 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1142
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001143- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1144 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1145 and pops on either side of the deque.
1146
1147- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1148 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1149
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001150- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1151 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1152 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1153 other functions that expect a function argument.
1154
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001155- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1156
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001157- os.getsid was added.
1158
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001159- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1160 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1161 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1162
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001163- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1164
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001165- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1166
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001167- readline.clear_history was added.
1168
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001169- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1170
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001171- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1172
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001173- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1174
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001175- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1176
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001177- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1178
1179- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1180
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001181- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1182
1183- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1184
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001185- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1186 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1187 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1188
1189- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1190 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1191 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1192 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1193 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1194 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1195 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1196
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001197- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1198 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1199 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1200 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001201
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001202- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001203 iterators from a single iterable.
1204
1205- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1206 of raising a TypeError exception.
1207
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001208- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1209 as parameter.
1210
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001211Library
1212-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001213
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001214- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1215 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1216 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001217
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001218- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1219 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1220 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001221
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001222- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001223
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001224- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1225 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001226
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001227- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1228 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1229
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001230- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1231
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001232- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001233 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001234
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001235- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001236 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001237
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001238- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1239
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001240- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1241 on cygwin and mingw32.
1242
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001243- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1244
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001245- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1246 module.
1247
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001248- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1249 installation scheme for all platforms.
1250
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001251- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001252 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001253
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001254- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1255 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1256 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1257
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001258- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1259 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1260 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1261
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001262- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1263
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001264- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1265
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001266- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1267 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1268
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001269- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1270 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1271 type pattern with the same value exists.
1272
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001273- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1274 when run from the command prompt).
1275
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001276- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1277 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1278
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001279- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1280 default sort).
1281
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001282- Added global runctx function to profile module
1283
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001284- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1285
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001286- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1287
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001288- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1289
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001290- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001291 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1292 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1293 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1294 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1295 accordingly.
1296
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001297- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1298 decoding standards.
1299
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001300- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1301 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1302 called for all requests.
1303
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001304- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1305 they are passed to the compiler.
1306
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001307- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1308 indent, width and depth.
1309
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001310- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1311 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1312
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001313- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1314 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1315
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001316- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1317
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001318- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1319
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001320- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1321
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001322- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1323 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1324
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001325- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001326 for better performance.
1327
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001328- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001329
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001330- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1331 a string).
1332
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001333- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1334
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001335- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1336
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001337- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1338
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001339- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1340
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001341- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1342 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1343 list of fieldnames.
1344
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001345- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1346 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1347
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001348- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1349
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001350- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1351 empty lists.
1352
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001353- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1354 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1355 and shelves.
1356
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001357- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1358 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1359
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001360- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001361 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1362 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001363
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001364- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1365 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001366 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001367
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001368- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001369 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1370 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1371
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001372- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1373 and removed in Py2.4.
1374
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001375- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1376
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001377- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1378
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001379Tools/Demos
1380-----------
1381
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001382- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1383 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1384
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001385- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1386
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001387- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1388 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1389 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1390 destination in situations where both files are given.
1391
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001392- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1393 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1394 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1395 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1396
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001397- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1398
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001399- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1400 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1401 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1402 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1403 now.
1404
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001405- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1406 in effect
1407
1408- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1409 C-c C-h
1410
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001411- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1412 -d option was given.
1413
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001414Build
1415-----
1416
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001417- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1418 build under OS X.
1419
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001420- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1421 --enable-profiling.
1422
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001423- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1424 is configured --with-tsc.
1425
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001426- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1427 on AMD64.
1428
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001429- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1430 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1431
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001432- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1433 removed.
1434
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001435- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1436 supported (see PEP 11).
1437
1438- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1439
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001440- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1441
1442- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1443 (see PEP 11).
1444
1445- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1446 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1447
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001448C API
1449-----
1450
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001451- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1452 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1453 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1454
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001455- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1456 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1457 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1458 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1459
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001460- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1461 generator objects.
1462
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001463- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1464 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001465 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1466 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001467
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001468- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1469 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1470
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001471- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1472 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1473 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1474 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1475 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1476
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001477- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1478 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1479 about 10% faster.
1480
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001481- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1482 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1483
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001484- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1485 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1486 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1487 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1488
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001489Windows
1490-------
1491
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001492- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1493 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1494 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1495 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1496
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001497- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1498 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1499 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1500
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001501
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001502What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1503===============================
1504
1505*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1506
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001507IDLE
1508----
1509
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001510- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1511 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1512 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1513 context-menu actions.
1514
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001515- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1516 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1517 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1518 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1519 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1520 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1521 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1522 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1523 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1524
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001525
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001526What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1527=============================================
1528
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001529*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001530
1531Core and builtins
1532-----------------
1533
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001534- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001535 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001536 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1537
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001538Extension modules
1539-----------------
1540
1541- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1542 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1543 than once. This has been fixed.
1544
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001545- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1546 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1547 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1548 call.
1549
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001550- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1551
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001552Library
1553-------
1554
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001555- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1556 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1557
1558- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1559 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1560 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1561 restored.
1562
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001563IDLE
1564----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001565
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001566- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001567
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001568Build
1569-----
1570
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001571- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1572 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1573
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001574C API
1575-----
1576
1577Windows
1578-------
1579
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001580- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1581 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1582
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001583- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1584
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001585Mac
1586---
1587
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001588- Various fixes to pimp.
1589
1590- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1591
1592- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1593 more problems than it solves.
1594
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001595
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001596What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1597=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001598
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001599*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1600
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001601Core and builtins
1602-----------------
1603
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001604- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1605 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1606
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001607- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1608 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001609 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001610
1611- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1612 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1613 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001614 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001615
1616- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1617 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001618
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001619- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1620 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1621 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1622
1623- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001624 770247.
1625
1626- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001627
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001628Extension modules
1629-----------------
1630
1631- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1632 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1633
1634- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1635
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001636- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1637
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001638- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1639 contained within the _strptime module.
1640
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001641- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1642 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1643
1644- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001645 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1646
1647- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1648 the find_class attribute, if present.
1649
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001650- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001651
1652 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1653 (SF bug 763298).
1654
1655 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001656 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1657 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1658 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001659
1660 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1661
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001662Library
1663-------
1664
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001665- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1666
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001667- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1668 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1669 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1670 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1671 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1672 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1673 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1674 or Tester().
1675
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001676- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1677 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1678 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1679 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1680 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1681 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1682 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1683 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1684 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001685
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001686 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001687
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001688- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1689 weren't before was an oversight.
1690
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001691- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1692 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1693
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001694- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1695 when there are no lines.
1696
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001697- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1698 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1699
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001700- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1701 to child processes.
1702
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001703- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1704
1705- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1706
1707- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1708 xmlrpclib.
1709
1710- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1711 responses.
1712
1713- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1714 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1715
1716- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1717 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1718 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1719
1720- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1721 used as patterns.
1722
1723- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1724 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1725 than Tk 8.3.
1726
1727- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1728
1729- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001730
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001731Tools/Demos
1732-----------
1733
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001734- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1735
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001736- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1737
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001738- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001739
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001740Build
1741-----
1742
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001743- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1744
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001745- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1746
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001747- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1748 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001749
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001750- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1751 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1752 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001753
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001754C API
1755-----
1756
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001757- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1758 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1759
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001760Windows
1761-------
1762
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001763- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1764 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1765 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1766 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1767 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1768 Python exception ::
1769
1770 thread.error: can't start new thread
1771
1772 is raised now.
1773
1774- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1775 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1776 instead of from DLL teardown.
1777
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001778Mac
1779---
1780
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001781- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001782 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001783 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1784 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1785 the executable in the bundle.
1786
1787- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001788
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001789- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1790
1791- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1792 on Panther.
1793
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001794What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1795================================
1796
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001797*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001798
1799Core and builtins
1800-----------------
1801
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001802- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1803 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1804 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1805 with the -i option.
1806
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001807- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1808 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1809
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001810- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1811 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1812
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001813- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1814 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1815 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1816 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1817 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1818 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1819 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1820 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1821 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1822 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1823 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1824 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1825 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001826
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001827- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1828 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1829 embedded in a lambda expression.
1830
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001831- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1832 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1833 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1834 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1835 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1836
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001837- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1838 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1839 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1840
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001841- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1842 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1843
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001844- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1845 It's writable again.
1846
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001847- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1848 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1849 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001850 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001851
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001852- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1853 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1854 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1855
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001856Extension modules
1857-----------------
1858
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001859- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1860 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1861
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001862- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1863 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1864 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1865 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1866
1867- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1868 collection.
1869
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001870- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1871 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1872 unique within a single program run.
1873
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001874- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1875 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1876
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001877- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1878 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1879
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001880- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1881 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001882
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001883- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1884
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001885- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1886 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1887
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001888- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1889 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1890 for many BSD-derived systems.
1891
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001892
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001893Library
1894-------
1895
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001896- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1897 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1898 primary ones:
1899
1900 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1901 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1902 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1903
1904 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1905 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1906 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1907 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1908 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1909 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1910
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001911- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1912 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1913 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1914 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1915 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1916 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1917 argument.
1918
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001919- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1920 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1921 in the archive.
1922
1923- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1924 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1925
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001926- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1927 569574).
1928
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001929- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1930 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1931 no more.
1932
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001933- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1934 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1935 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1936 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1937 code coverage.
1938
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001939- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1940 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1941 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001942 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1943 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001944
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001945- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1946 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1947 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001948 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001949
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001950- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1951
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001952- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1953 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1954 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1955 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1956
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001957- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1958 handling.
1959
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001960- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1961 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1962
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001963- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1964 in socket.py.
1965
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001966- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1967
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001968- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1969 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1970 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1971 opener with proxy support.
1972
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001973- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1974
1975- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1976
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001977Tools/Demos
1978-----------
1979
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001980- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1981
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001982- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1983
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001984- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1985 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001986
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001987- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1988 files.
1989
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001990Build
1991-----
1992
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001993- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001994 different root directory.
1995
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001996C API
1997-----
1998
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001999- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2000 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2001 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2002 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2003 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2004 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2005 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2006 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2007 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2008 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2009
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002010- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2011 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2012 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2013 from Python.
2014
2015
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002016New platforms
2017-------------
2018
2019None this time.
2020
2021Tests
2022-----
2023
2024- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2025 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2026
2027Windows
2028-------
2029
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002030- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2031
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002032- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2033 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2034 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2035 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2036 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2037 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2038 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2039 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2040 that's what it's for.
2041
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002042Mac
2043---
2044
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002045- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2046 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2047 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2048 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002049- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2050 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2051- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002052
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002053SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2054------------------------------------
2055
2056430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2057598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2058622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2059661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2060683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2061697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2062713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2063724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2064727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2065729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2066730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2067731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2068732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2069733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2070735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2071740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2072744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2073745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2074747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2075749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2076751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2077753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2078755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2079757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2080760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2081
2082
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002083What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2084================================
2085
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002086*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002087
2088Core and builtins
2089-----------------
2090
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002091- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2092 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2093
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002094- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2095 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2096 and cannot be strings).
2097
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002098- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2099 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2100 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2101 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2102
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002103- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2104 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2105 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2106 Python itself.
2107
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002108- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2109 the referenced object, if it has one.
2110
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002111- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2112 the thread started at
2113 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2114
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002115- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2116 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2117 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2118 placed on a list index.
2119
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002120- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2121 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2122 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2123 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2124
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002125- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2126 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2127 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2128 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2129 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2130 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2131 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2132
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002133- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2134 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2135 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2136 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2137 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2138
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002139- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2140 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002141
2142- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2143 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2144 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2145 #693195.)
2146
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002147- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2148 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002149
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002150- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002151 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002152 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2153 interpreter executions, would fail.
2154
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002155- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002156 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002157 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002158
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002159Extension modules
2160-----------------
2161
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002162- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2163 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2164 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2165 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2166
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002167- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2168 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2169
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002170- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2171 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2172 and Greg Chapman.)
2173
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002174- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2175 recursively.
2176
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002177- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002178 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2179 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2180 leaks.
2181
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002182- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2183
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002184- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2185 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2186 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2187 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2188 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2189 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2190 #705836.
2191
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002192- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002193 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2194
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002195- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2196 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2197 See SF bug #692416.
2198
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002199- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2200 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2201
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002202- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2203 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2204 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002205
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002206- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002207 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2208 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2209
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002210- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2211 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2212 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2213 timeouts to work properly.
2214
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002215Library
2216-------
2217
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002218- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2219 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2220 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2221 future release.
2222
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002223- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2224 for querying platform dependent features.
2225
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002226- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002227
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002228- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2229 pickle protocol versions.
2230
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002231- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2232 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2233 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2234
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002235- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2236
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002237- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2238 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2239 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2240 modules.
2241
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002242- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2243 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2244 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2245
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002246- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2247 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2248
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002249- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2250 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2251 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2252
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002253- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002254 MS Office extensions.
2255
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002256- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2257 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2258
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002259- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2260 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2261
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002262- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2263 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2264 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2265 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2266 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2267 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2268
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002269- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2270 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2271 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002272
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002273- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2274 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2275 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2276
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002277- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2278
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002279- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2280 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2281 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2282
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002283Tools/Demos
2284-----------
2285
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002286- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2287 See the module docstring for details.
2288
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002289Build
2290-----
2291
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002292- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2293 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002294
2295C API
2296-----
2297
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002298- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2299
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002300- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2301 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2302 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2303
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002304- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2305 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002306
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002307 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2308 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2309 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002310
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002311- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002312 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2313
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002314- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2315 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2316 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002317
2318New platforms
2319-------------
2320
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002321None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002322
2323Tests
2324-----
2325
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002326- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2327 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002328
2329Windows
2330-------
2331
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002332- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2333 function.
2334
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002335- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2336 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002337
2338Mac
2339---
2340
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002341- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2342 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002343
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002344- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2345 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002346
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002347- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2348 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2349 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002350
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002351- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002352 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2353 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002354
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002355- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2356 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002357
2358
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002359What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2360=================================
2361
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002362*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002363
2364Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002365-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002366
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002367- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2368 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2369 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2370
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002371- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2372 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2373 (SF patch #664376.)
2374
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002375- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2376 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2377 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2378 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2379 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2380 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002381 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002382
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002383- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2384 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2385 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2386 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002387 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002388
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002389- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2390 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2391 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2392 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2393 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2394 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2395 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2396 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2397 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2398 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2399 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2400
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002401- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2402 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2403 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2404 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2405 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2406 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2407
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002408- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2409 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2410
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002411- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2412 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2413 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2414 case.)
2415
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002416- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2417 passed as unicode strings.
2418
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002419- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2420 See SF bug #683467.
2421
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002422- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2423 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2424
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002425- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2426
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002427- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2428
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002429- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2430 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2431 arguments.
2432
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002433- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2434 See SF bug #667147.
2435
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002436- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002437 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002438 See SF bug #676155.
2439
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002440- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002441 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002442 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2443 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2444 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2445 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2446 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2447 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002448
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002449Extension modules
2450-----------------
2451
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002452- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2453 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2454 tp_as_number pointer.
2455
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002456- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2457 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2458 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2459 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2460 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2461
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002462- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2463
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002464- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2465
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002466- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002467 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002468 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2469 patch #678531.)
2470
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002471- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2472 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2473
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002474- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2475 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2476
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002477- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2478
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002479- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2480 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2481 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2482
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002483- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2484
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002485- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2486 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2487
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002488- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002489
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002490- datetime changes:
2491
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002492 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2493
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002494 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2495 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2496 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2497 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2498 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2499 now.
2500
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002501 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002502 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2503 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002504
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002505 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002506 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002507 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2508 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2509 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2510 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002511
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002512 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2513 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2514 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002515 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2516
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002517 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2518 by a later example coded by Guido.
2519
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002520 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002521 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2522 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2523 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002524 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2525 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2526
2527 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2528 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2529 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2530 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2531 tzinfo subclass instance.
2532
2533 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2534 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2535 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2536 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2537 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2538 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2539 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2540 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002541
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002542 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2543 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2544 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2545 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2546 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002547 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2548
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002549 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002550
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002551 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2552 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2553 as a naive datetime object.
2554
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002555 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2556 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2557 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2558
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002559 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2560 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2561 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2562 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2563 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2564 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2565 comparison.
2566
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002567 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2568 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2569 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2570 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002571 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002572
2573 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002574
2575 and ::
2576
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002577 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2578
2579 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2580 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2581 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2582 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2583
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002584 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2585 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2586 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2587 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2588 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2589
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002590 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2591 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002592 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2593 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002594
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002595Library
2596-------
2597
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002598- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2599 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2600
2601- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2602 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2603 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2604 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2605 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2606 See PEP 307 for details.
2607
2608- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2609 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2610
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002611- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2612 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002613 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002614 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2615 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002616 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002617
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002618- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2619 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2620
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002621- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2622 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2623 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2624
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002625- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2626
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002627- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2628 exception.
2629
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002630- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2631 class.
2632
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002633- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2634 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2635 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2636
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002637- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2638 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2639
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002640- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002641 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2642 See SF bug #659228.
2643
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002644- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2645 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2646 See SF patch #651082.
2647
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002648- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002649
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002650- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2651 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2652
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002653- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002654 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002655
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002656- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2657 DOS paths from other platforms.
2658
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002659Tools/Demos
2660-----------
2661
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002662- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2663 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2664 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2665 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2666 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2667 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2668 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2669 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2670 example:
2671
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002672 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2673 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002674
2675 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2676
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002677
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002678Build
2679-----
2680
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002681- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2682 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2683 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002684 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2685
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002686 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2687
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002688- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2689 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2690 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2691 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2692 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2693 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2694 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2695 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2696 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2697
2698- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2699 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2700 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2701 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2702
2703- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2704 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2705
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002706C API
2707-----
2708
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002709- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2710 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002711
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002712- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2713 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2714 tp_as_number pointer.
2715
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002716- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2717 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2718 (SF #681367)
2719
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002720- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2721 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2722 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2723 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002724
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002725Tests
2726-----
2727
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002728- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002729 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2730 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2731 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2732 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2733 pydoc.)
2734
2735- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2736
2737- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002738
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002739Windows
2740-------
2741
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002742- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2743 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2744 time).
2745
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002746- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2747 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2748
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002749- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2750 release without strong cryptography.
2751
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002752- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002753 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002754
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002755- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2756 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2757
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002758Mac
2759---
2760
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002761- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2762 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002763
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002764- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2765 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2766 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002767
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002768- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2769 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002770
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002771- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2772 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2773 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2774 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002775
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002776- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002777 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2778 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2779 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002780
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002781
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002782What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002783=================================
2784
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002785*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002786
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002787Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002788--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002789
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002790- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2791
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002792- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2793 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002794 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002795 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002796 a different meaning than before.
2797
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002798- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002799 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002800 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002801
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002802- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002803 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002804 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002805
2806- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2807 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2808 and deallocation.
2809
2810- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2811 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2812
2813- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2814 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2815 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2816 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2817 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2818
2819- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2820 now detected by the garbage collector.
2821
2822- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2823 [SF bug 519621]
2824
2825- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2826 identifier.
2827
2828- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2829 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2830 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2831 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2832 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2833 [SF bug 563060]
2834
2835- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2836 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2837 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2838 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2839 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2840
2841- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2842 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2843 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2844
2845- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2846
2847- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2848 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2849 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2850 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2851 state of the slots would be lost.)
2852
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002853Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002854-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002855
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002856- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002857 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2858 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2859 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2860 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002861 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2862 Jython 2.1.
2863
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002864- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002865 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002866 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2867 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2868 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2869 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2870 these, see PEP 302.
2871
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002872- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2873 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2874 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2875
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002876- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2877 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2878 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2879
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002880- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2881 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2882 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2883
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002884- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2885 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2886 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2887 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2888 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2889 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2890 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2891 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2892 releases or implementations.
2893
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002894- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002895 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2896 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002897
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002898- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2899 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2900
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002901- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2902 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2903 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2904
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002905- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2906 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2907
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002908- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2909 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002910 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2911 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002912
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002913- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2914 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2915 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2916 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2917 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2918
2919 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2920 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2921 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2922 pattern.
2923
2924 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2925 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2926 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2927 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2928
2929 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2930 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2931 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2932 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2933 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2934 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2935
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002936- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2937 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2938 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2939 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2940 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2941 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2942 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2943 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002944
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002945- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2946 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2947 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2948 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2949 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002950 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2951 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2952 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2953 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2954 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2955 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2956 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002957
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002958- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2959 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2960
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002961- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2962 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2963 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2964 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2965 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2966 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2967 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2968 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2969 to Zack Weinberg!
2970
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002971- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2972 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2973 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2974 type. This has been fixed now.
2975
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002976- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2977 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2978 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2979
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002980- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2981 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2982 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2983 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2984 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2985 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2986 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2987 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002988 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002989
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002990- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2991 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2992 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002993
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002994- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2995 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2996 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2997 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2998 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2999 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3000 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3001 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003002 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003003 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3004 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3005
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003006- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3007 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3008 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3009 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3010 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3011 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3012 this.)
3013
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003014- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3015 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003016 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003017 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003018 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3019 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003020 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3021 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003022
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003023- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3024 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3025 currently running.
3026
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003027- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3028 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3029 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3030 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3031
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003032- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3033 as directory names.
3034
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003035- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3036 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3037
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003038- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3039 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3040
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003041- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003042 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3043 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003044
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003045- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3046 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3047 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3048 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3049 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3050
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003051- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3052 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3053 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3054 removed.
3055
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003056- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3057 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3058 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3059
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003060- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3061 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3062 to __debug__.
3063
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003064- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3065 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3066 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3067
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003068- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3069 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3070 deprecated now.
3071
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003072- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3073 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3074 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003075
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003076- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3077 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3078 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3079 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3080 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003081
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003082- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3083 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3084
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003085- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3086 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3087 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003088 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003089 is backward compatible.
3090
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003091- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3092 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3093 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3094 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3095 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3096
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003097- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3098 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3099 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3100 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3101 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3102 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003103
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003104- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3105 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3106
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003107- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3108 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3109
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003110- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3111 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3112 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3113 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3114 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3115
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003116- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3117 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3118 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3119
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003120- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003121 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3122
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003123- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3124 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3125 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003126
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003127- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3128 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3129
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003130- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3131 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3132 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3133
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003134- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3135
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003136Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003137-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003138
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003139- Added three operators to the operator module:
3140 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3141 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3142 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3143
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003144- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3145
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003146- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3147 archives.
3148
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003149- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3150 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3151 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3152
3153 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3154
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003155- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3156 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3157 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003158 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003159
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003160- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3161 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3162 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3163 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003164 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3165 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3166 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3167 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003168
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003169- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3170 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003171
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003172- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3173
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003174- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3175 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3176
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003177- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3178 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3179 supported.
3180
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003181- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3182
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003183- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3184 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003185
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003186- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3187 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3188
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003189- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3190
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003191- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3192 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3193
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003194- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3195 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3196 functions but callable type objects.
3197
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003198- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003199 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003200 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003201
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003202- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3203 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003204
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003205- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3206 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003207
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003208- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3209 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3210 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3211 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3212
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003213- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3214 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003215
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003216- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3217 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3218 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3219 and __imul__.
3220
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003221- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003222 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3223 is called.
3224
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003225- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3226 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3227 interpreter was compiled.
3228
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003229- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3230 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3231 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003232 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003233 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3234 1, not 2.
3235
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003236- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3237 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3238 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3239 limit.
3240
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003241- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3242 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3243 bug #623464.
3244
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003245- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3246 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3247 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3248 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3249
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003250Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003251-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003252
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003253- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3254
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003255- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3256 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3257 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3258 with Python 2.3a2.
3259
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003260- os.path exposes getctime.
3261
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003262- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003263 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003264 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003265 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003266 unit tests of floating point results.
3267
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003268- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3269 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3270 has been increased.
3271
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003272- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3273 executed.
3274
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003275- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3276 postinstallation script.
3277
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003278- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3279 test the current module.
3280
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003281- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003282 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3283 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3284 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3285 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3286
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003287- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003288 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003289 Ward's Optik package.
3290
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003291- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3292 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3293 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3294 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3295
3296- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3297 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003298 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003299
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003300- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3301 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3302 shelf are binary pickles.
3303
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003304- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3305 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3306
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003307- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3308 modules are iterators now.
3309
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003310- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3311 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3312 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3313 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3314 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3315 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003316
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003317- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3318 with their entity value.
3319
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003320- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3321
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003322- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3323 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003324
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003325- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3326 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003327 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003328
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003329- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3330 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3331 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3332 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3333 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3334 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3335 main():
3336
3337 import locale
3338 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3339
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003340- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3341 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3342
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003343- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3344 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3345 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3346 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3347 to the new standard.
3348
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003349- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3350 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3351 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3352 an extension to the database.
3353
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003354- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3355 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3356 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3357 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003358 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003359
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003360- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003361 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003362
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003363- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3364 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3365 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3366 bounded integers.
3367
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003368- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3369 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3370 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3371 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3372 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3373 in existence.
3374
3375 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3376 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3377 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3378 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3379 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3380 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3381
3382 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3383 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3384 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3385 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3386
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003387- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3388 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3389 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3390
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003391- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3392
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003393- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3394 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3395 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3396 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3397
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003398- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3399 argument.
3400
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003401- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3402 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3403 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3404 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3405 [SF patch 560794].
3406
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003407- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3408 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3409 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003410 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3411 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3412 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003413
3414- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3415 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003416
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003417- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3418 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3419 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3420 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003421
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003422- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3423 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3424 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3425 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3426 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3427
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003428- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003429
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003430- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3431
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003432- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3433 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3434 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3435 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3436 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3437 identical to None.
3438
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003439- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3440 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3441 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3442 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3443 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3444 results now.
3445
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003446- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3447 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3448
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003449- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3450 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3451 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3452 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3453 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3454 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3455 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3456 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3457
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003458- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3459
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003460- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3461 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3462
3463- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3464 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3465 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3466 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3467 and other systems.
3468
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003469- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3470 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3471 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3472 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 +00003473 work well with these.
3474
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003475- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3476
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003477- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003478 connections.
3479
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003480- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3481 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3482 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3483
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003484- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3485 sets
3486
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003487- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3488 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3489 name.
3490
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003491- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3492 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3493 passed in.
3494
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003495- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003496 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003497 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3498 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003499
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003500- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3501
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003502- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3503
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003504- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3505 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3506 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3507
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003508- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3509 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3510 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3511 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003512 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003513
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003514- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003515 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003516 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003517
3518- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3519 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3520 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3521
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003522- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003523 the value of its expression argument.
3524
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003525- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3526 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3527 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3528
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003529- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3530 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3531 skipstone browser was included.
3532
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003533- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3534 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3535
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003536Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003537-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003538
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003539- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3540 names in addition to accepting file names.
3541
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003542- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3543 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3544 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3545 still used and useful.)
3546
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003547- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3548 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3549 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3550 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003551
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003552- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3553 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3554 the generated binary.
3555
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003556Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003557-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003558
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003559- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3560
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003561- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3562 except in the hands of experts.
3563
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003564- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003565 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3566 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3567 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003568
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003569- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3570 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3571 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3572 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3573 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3574 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3575 builds.
3576
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003577- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3578 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3579 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3580 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3581 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3582 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3583 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3584 new type.
3585
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003586- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003587
3588 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3589 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3590 positive infinities.
3591
3592 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3593 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3594 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3595 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3596 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3597 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3598 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3599
3600 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3601
3602 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3603
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003604- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3605 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3606 size of the executable.
3607
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003608- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3609 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3610 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3611 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003612
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003613- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3614
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003615- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3616 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3617 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003618
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003619- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3620 well as Unix.
3621
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003622- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3623 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3624 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3625 modules in the README file for details.
3626
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003627C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003628-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003629
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003630- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3631 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003632 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003633 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003634 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003635
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003636- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3637 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3638 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3639 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3640 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3641 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003642 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003643 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3644 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3645 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3646 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3647 aligned.)
3648
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003649- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3650 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3651 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3652
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003653- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3654 level.
3655
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003656- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3657 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3658 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3659 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3660 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3661
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003662- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3663 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3664 code.
3665
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003666- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3667 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3668 adjusting for negative indices.
3669
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003670- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3671 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3672 object.
3673
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003674- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3675 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3676 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3677
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003678- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3679 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003680
3681- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3682
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003683- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3684 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3685 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3686 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3687
3688- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3689
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003690- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003691
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003692- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003693 without going through the buffer API.
3694
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003695- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003696
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003697- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3698 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3699 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3700 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3701
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003702- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3703 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3704
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003705- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003706 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3707
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003708New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003709-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003710
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003711- OpenVMS is now supported.
3712
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003713- AtheOS is now supported.
3714
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003715- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3716
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003717- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3718
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003719Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003720-----
3721
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003722- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3723 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3724 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003725
3726Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003727-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003728
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003729- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3730 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3731 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3732 bugs.
3733 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003734 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003735 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3736 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003737 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003738
3739- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003740 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003741
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003742- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3743 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3744
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003745- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3746 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003747 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003748 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3749
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003750- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3751 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3752 use files" uninstall option).
3753
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003754- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3755
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003756- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3757 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3758
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003759- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3760 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3761 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3762
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003763- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3764 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3765 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3766 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3767 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003768 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3769 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3770 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003771
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003772- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003773 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003774 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3775 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3776 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3777 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3778 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3779 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3780 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3781 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3782 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3783 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3784 work around.
3785
3786- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3787 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3788 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3789 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3790 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3791 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3792 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3793 specified with O_CREAT too).
3794
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003795Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003796----
3797
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003798- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003799
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003800- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3801 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3802 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3803
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003804- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3805 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3806 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3807
3808- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3809 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3810 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3811 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3812 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3813 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3814 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3815 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003816
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003817- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3818 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3819 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003820
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003821- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3822 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3823 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3824 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3825 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003826
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003827- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3828 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3829 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003830
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003831- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3832 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003833
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003834- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3835 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3836 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3837 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3838 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003839
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003840- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3841 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3842 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3843
3844- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3845 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3846 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003847
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003848- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3849 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3850 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3851 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003852 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003853
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003854- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3855 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003856
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003857- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3858 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003859
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003860- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003861 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003862 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3863 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003864
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003865
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003866What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003867===============================
3868
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003869*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3870
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003871Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003872--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003873
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003874- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3875 with a custom metaclass.
3876
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003877Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003878-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003879
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003880- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3881 are proxies.
3882
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003883Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003884-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003885
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003886- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3887 very short strings.
3888
3889- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3890 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3891 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3892 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3893 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3894
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003895Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003896-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003897
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003898- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3899 close or delete time).
3900
3901- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3902 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3903
3904- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3905
3906- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003907 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003908
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003909Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003910-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003911
3912Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003913-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003914
3915C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003916-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003917
3918New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003919-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003920
3921Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003922-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003923
3924Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003925-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003926
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003927- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3928
3929- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3930 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3931
3932- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3933 deleted at process exit time.
3934
3935- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3936 in backslash.
3937
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003938Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003939----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003940
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003941- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3942 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3943 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3944
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003945
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003946What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003947===========================
3948
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003949*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3950
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003951Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003952--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003953
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003954- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3955 been extensively updated. See
3956
3957 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3958
3959 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3960
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003961- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3962 deleted!
3963
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003964- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3965 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3966 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3967 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3968 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3969
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003970- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3971
3972 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3973 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3974
3975 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3976 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3977 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3978 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3979 supported anyway.
3980
3981 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3982 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3983
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003984- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3985 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3986 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3987 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3988 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003989
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003990- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3991 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3992 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3993
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003994Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003995-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003996
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003997- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3998 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3999 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4000 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4001 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4002 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004003 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4004 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4005 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4006 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004007
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004008- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4009 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4010 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4011
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004012Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004013-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004014
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004015- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4016
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004017Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004018-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004019
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004020- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4021 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4022 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4023 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4024 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4025 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4026
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004027- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4028
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004029- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4030
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004031- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4032
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004033- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4034 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4035 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4036
4037- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4038
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004039Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004040-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004041
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004042- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4043 off a search on Google.
4044
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004045Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004046-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004047
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004048- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4049 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4050 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4051 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4052 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4053 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4054 other platforms should do likewise.
4055
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004056- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4057 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4058 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4059
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004060C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004061-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004062
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004063- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4064 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4065 producing key-value pairs.
4066
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004067- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004068 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004069 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4070 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4071 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4072 previously went unchallenged.
4073
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004074New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004075-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004076
4077Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004078-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004079
4080Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004081-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004082
4083Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004084----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004085
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004086- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4087 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004088
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004089- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4090 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4091 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4092 home.
4093
4094
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004095What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004096===========================
4097
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004098*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4099
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004100Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004101--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004102
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004103- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4104 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004105
4106 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004107 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004108
4109 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4110 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004111 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004112 This needs to be documented.
4113
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004114- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4115 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4116
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004117- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4118 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4119 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4120
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004121- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4122 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4123
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004124- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4125 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4126 class forbids it).
4127
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004128- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4129 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4130 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4131
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004132- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4133
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004134Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004135-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004136
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004137- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4138 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004139 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004140
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004141- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4142 (like 1 + '').
4143
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004144Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004145-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004146
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004147- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4148 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4149 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4150 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004151 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004152 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4153
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004154- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4155 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4156 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4157 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4158
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004159- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4160 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004161 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4162 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4163 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004164
4165- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4166 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004167
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004168- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4169 bytes on its input.
4170
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004171Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004172-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004173
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004174- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004175 convenience function.
4176
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004177- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4178 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4179 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004180 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4181 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4182 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4183 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4184 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4185 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004186
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004187- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4188 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4189 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4190 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4191
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004192- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4193 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4194 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4195
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004196- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4197 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4198 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4199 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4200
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004201- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4202 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004203 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004204 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4205 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4206 new -l and -e options.
4207
4208- statcache is now deprecated.
4209
4210- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4211 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004212 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004213 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4214 time properly taken into account.
4215
4216- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4217 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4218 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4219 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4220
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004221Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004222-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004223
4224Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004225-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004226
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004227- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4228 is built with libdb3 if available.
4229
4230- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4231
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004232C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004233-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004234
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004235- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4236 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4237 PySequence_Size().
4238
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004239- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4240
4241- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4242 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4243 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4244
4245- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4246 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4247
4248- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4249 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4250
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004251New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004252-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004253
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004254- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4255 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4256
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004257- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4258 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4259
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004260- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4261
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004262Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004263-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004264
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004265- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4266 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4267
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004268Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004269-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004270
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004271Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004272----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004273
4274- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4275 removed completely in the next release.
4276
4277- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4278 OSX.
4279
4280- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4281 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4282
4283- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4284
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004285
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004286What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004287===========================
4288
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004289*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4290
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004291Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004292--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004293
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004294- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004295 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004296 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004297 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4298 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004299 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4300 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004301 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4302 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004303
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004304- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4305 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4306
4307- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4308 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4309
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004310Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004311-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004312
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004313- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4314 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4315 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4316 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4317 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4318 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4319 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4320 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4321
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004322- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4323 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4324 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4325 example).
4326
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004327- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004328 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004329 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004330 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004331
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004332- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4333 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4334 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004335 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004336
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004337- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4338 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4339 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4340 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4341 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4342 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4343
4344 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4345
4346 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4347
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004348Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004349-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004350
4351- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4352
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004353- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4354
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004355- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4356 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004357
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004358- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4359 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4360 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4361 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4362 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4363 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004364 attributes.
4365
4366- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4367 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4368 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004369
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004370- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4371 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4372 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004373
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004374- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4375 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4376 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004377 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4378 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4379
4380- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4381 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004382
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004383Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004384-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004385
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004386- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4387 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4388
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004389- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4390 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4391 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4392 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4393
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004394- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4395 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4396 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4397 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4398
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004399 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4400 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4401 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4402 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4403 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4404 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4405 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4406 without losing information).
4407
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004408- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004409 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4410 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4411 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4412 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4413 module).
4414
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004415 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004416 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4417 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4418 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4419 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004420
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004421- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004422 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4423 encoding.
4424
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004425- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4426 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4427
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004428- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004429 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4430
4431- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4432 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4433 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4434 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4435
4436- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4437
4438- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4439 ON, and OFF.
4440
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004441- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4442 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4443
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004444Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004445-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004446
4447- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4448 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4449 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004450
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004451- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4452 been added: -X and -E.
4453
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004454Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004455-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004456
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004457- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4458 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4459
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004460C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004461-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004462
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004463- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4464 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4465 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4466 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4467 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4468
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004469- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4470 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4471 as long) arguments.
4472
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004473- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4474 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4475 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4476 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4477 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4478 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4479
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004480- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4481 input.
4482
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004483New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004484-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004485
4486Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004487-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004488
4489Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004490-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004491
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004492- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4493 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4494 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4495
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004496- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4497 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4498 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004499 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004500
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004501 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4502 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4503 import signal
4504 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004505
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004506 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004507 while 1:
4508 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004509 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004510 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4511 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4512 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4513 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004514
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004515
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004516What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4517===========================
4518
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004519*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4520
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004521Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004522--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004523
4524- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4525 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4526 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4527
4528- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4529 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4530 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4531 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4532 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4533 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4534 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004535
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004536- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004537 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004538 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4539 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4540 associate a docstring with a property.
4541
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004542- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4543 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4544 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4545 other built-in object types.
4546
4547- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4548 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4549 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4550 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4551 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4552
4553- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4554 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4555
4556- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4557 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004558 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004559 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4560 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4561 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4562 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4563 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4564
4565- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4566 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4567 class.
4568
4569- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4570 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4571 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4572 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4573
4574- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4575 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4576 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4577 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4578
4579- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4580 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4581
4582- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4583 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4584 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4585 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4586 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004587 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004588 with the same value as s.
4589
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004590- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4591
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004592Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004593----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004594
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004595- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4596
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004597- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4598 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4599 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4600 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4601 objects.
4602
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004603- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4604 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004605 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4606 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4607
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004608- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4609 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4610 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4611
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004612Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004613-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004614
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004615- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4616 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4617 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4618 by the instances.
4619
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004620- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4621 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4622 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4623
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004624- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4625 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4626 before the entire comparison is complete.
4627
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004628- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4629 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4630 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4631
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004632- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4633 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4634 getwriter().
4635
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004636- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4637 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4638
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004639- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004640 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4641 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4642
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004643- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4644 iterable object.
4645
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004646- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4647 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004648
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004649- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4650 authentication.
4651
4652- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4653 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004654
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004655- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004656 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4657 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4658 a sample driver.)
4659
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004660Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004661-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004662
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004663- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4664 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4665 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4666 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4667 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4668 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4669 kernel has large file support.
4670
4671- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4672 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4673 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4674 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4675 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4676
4677- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4678 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4679 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4680
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004681C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004682-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004683
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004684- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4685 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4686
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004687New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004688-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004689
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004690- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4691 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4692
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004693Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004694-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004695
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004696- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4697 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4698 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4699 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4700 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4701
4702- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4703 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4704 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4705 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4706
4707- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4708 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4709
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004710Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004711-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004712
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004713- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004714 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4715 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004716
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004717
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004718What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4719===========================
4720
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004721*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4722
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004723Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004724----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004725
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004726- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4727 big to represent as a C double.
4728
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004729- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4730 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4731 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4732 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4733 restriction).
4734
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004735- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4736 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4737 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4738 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4739 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4740
4741 >>> dir([])
4742 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4743 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4744 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4745 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4746 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4747 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4748 'reverse', 'sort']
4749
4750 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4751
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004752- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004753 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4754 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4755 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4756 OverflowError exception.
4757
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004758- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004759 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004760 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4761 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4762 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4763 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4764 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004765 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004766 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4767 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4768
4769 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4770 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4771 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4772 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004773
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004774- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004775 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4776 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4777 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4778 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4779 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4780 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4781 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4782 once it is created.
4783
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004784- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4785 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4786 (key, value) pairs.
4787
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004788- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004789 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4790 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4791
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004792- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4793 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4794 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4795 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4796 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004797
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004798- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004799 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4800 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4801
4802 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4803
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004804- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004805 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4806
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004807Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004808-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004809
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004810- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004811 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4812 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004813
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004814- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4815 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4816 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4817 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4818 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4819 in this area anymore).
4820
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004821- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4822 threading.Timer.
4823
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004824- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4825 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4826
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004827- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004828 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4829
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004830- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004831 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4832 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4833 converted to Python longs.
4834
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004835- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004836 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4837
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004838- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4839 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4840 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4841
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004842Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004843-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004844
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004845- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4846 division operators as per PEP 238.
4847
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004848Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004849-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004850
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004851- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4852 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4853 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4854 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4855
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004856C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004857-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004858
4859- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004860
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004861- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4862 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004863 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004864
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004865 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4866 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004867 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004868 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004869
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004870- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004871 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4872 module:
4873
4874 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004875
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004876 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4877 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004878
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004879 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4880 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004881
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004882 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4883
4884 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4885
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004886- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004887 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4888 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4889 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004890
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004891New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004892-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004893
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004894- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4895 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4896 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4897 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4898 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004899
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004900Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004901-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004902
4903Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004904-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004905
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004906- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4907 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4908 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4909 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004910 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4911 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4912 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4913 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4914 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004915
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004916- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004917 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4918
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004919
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004920What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4921===========================
4922
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004923*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4924
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004925Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004926-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004927
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004928- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4929 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4930
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004931- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4932 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4933 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004934
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004935- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4936 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4937 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4938 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004939
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004940- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4941
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004942- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004943
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004944Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004945-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004946
4947- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004948 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004949 the module docstring for details.
4950
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004951Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004952-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004953
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004954- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004955 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4956 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4957 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004958
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004959- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4960 Nick Mathewson.
4961
4962Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004963----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004964
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004965- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4966 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4967 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4968 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4969 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4970 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4971 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4972 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4973
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004974- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4975 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4976 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4977 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4978
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004979- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4980 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4981 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4982 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4983 come a long way).
4984
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004985- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4986 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4987 write filters for these warnings).
4988
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004989- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4990 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4991 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4992 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4993 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4994
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004995- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4996 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4997 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4998 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4999 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5000 older distribution.
5001
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005002Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005003-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005004
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005005- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5006 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005007 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005008
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005009- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5010 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5011 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5012
5013- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5014
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005015- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5016
5017- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5018
5019- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5020
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005021- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005022
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005023- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5024
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005025New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005026-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005027
5028C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005029-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005030
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005031- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5032 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5033 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5034 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5035 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5036 against buffer overruns.
5037
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005038- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005039 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5040 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005041 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5042 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5043 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5044
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005045- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5046 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5047 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5048 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5049 deprecated.
5050
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005051Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005052-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005053
5054- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5055 relevant is found.
5056
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005057
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005058What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005059===========================
5060
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005061*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5062
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005063Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005064----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005065
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005066- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5067 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5068 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5069 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5070 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5071 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5072 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5073 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005074 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005075 repaired.
5076
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005077- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005078 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005079 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5080 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5081 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5082 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5083 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5084 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5085 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5086 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5087
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005088- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5089 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5090 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5091 leading BMO character).
5092
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005093- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5094 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5095 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5096
5097 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5098 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5099 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005100
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005101 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5102 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5103 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5104 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5105 for various simple to use conversions.
5106
5107 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5108 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5109
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005110 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5111 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5112 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5113 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5114 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5115 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5116 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5117 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5118 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5119 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5120 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5121 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5122 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5123 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5124 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005125
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005126- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5127 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5128 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005129 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005130 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005131
5132 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005133 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5134 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5135 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5136 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5137 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005138 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5139 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005140
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005141 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5142 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5143 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005144 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005145
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005146- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5147 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5148 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5149 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5150 floating arithmetic,
5151
5152 x = 9007199254740992.0
5153 print long(x)
5154
5155 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5156 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5157 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5158 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5159 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5160 functions are of good quality).
5161
5162 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5163 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5164 algorithms to break.
5165
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005166- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5167 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5168 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5169 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5170 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5171 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5172 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5173 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5174 order.
5175
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005176- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5177 operation along the most common code paths.
5178
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005179- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5180 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5181
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005182- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5183 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5184 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5185 {}.update(UserDict())
5186
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005187- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5188 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5189 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5190 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5191 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5192 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5193 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5194 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5195
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005196- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005197 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005198
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005199 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005200 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5201 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005202 join() method of strings
5203 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005204 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5205 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005206 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005207 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005208
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005209- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5210 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5211
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005212- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5213 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5214
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005215- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5216 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5217 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5218 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5219
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005220- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5221 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005222 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005223 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5224 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005225
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005226- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5227
5228
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005229Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005230-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005231
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005232- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005233 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005234 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5235 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5236
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005237- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5238 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5239
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005240- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5241 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5242 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5243 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5244
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005245- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5246 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5247 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5248
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005249- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5250
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005251- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5252
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005253- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5254 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5255 that are still imported into string.py).
5256
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005257- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5258
5259- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5260 Now it does.
5261
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005262- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5263
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005264- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5265 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5266 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5267 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5268 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005269 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5270 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005271
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005272- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5273 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5274 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5275 'help(object)'.
5276
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005277Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005278-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005279
5280- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005281 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005282 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5283 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5284
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005285- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005286 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5287 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005288
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005289C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005290-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005291
5292- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5293 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005294
5295----
5296
5297**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**