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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +000015- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
16 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
17
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +000018- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
19 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
20 modified the list.
21
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +000022- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
23 functions is now writable.
24
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +000025- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
26 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
27 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
28 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
29
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000030- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
31 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
32 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
33 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
34 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +000035
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +000036- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
37 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
38
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000039Extension modules
40-----------------
41
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +000042- Added socket.socketpair().
43
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000044Library
45-------
46
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +000047- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
48 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
49 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
50 than creating a new one.
51
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +000052- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
53 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
54 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
55 and exponent.
56
57- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
58
59- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
60 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
61 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
62
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +000063- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
64 to the readline module.
65
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +000066- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +000067 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
68 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +000069
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +000070- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
71 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
72 contains symlinks.
73
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +000074- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
75 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
76
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +000077- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
78 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
79 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
80
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000081- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
82 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
83 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
84 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
85 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
86 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
87 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
88 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
89 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
90 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
91 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
92 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
93 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
94
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +000095- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
96
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000097Tools/Demos
98-----------
99
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000100- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
101 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
102
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000103- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
104
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000105Build
106-----
107
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000108- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
109 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
110
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000111- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
112 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
113
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000114- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
115 GNU/k*BSD systems.
116
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000117C API
118-----
119
120Documentation
121-------------
122
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000123- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if it contains
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000124symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment since 1992, but is now in
125the library reference as well.
126
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000127New platforms
128-------------
129
130Tests
131-----
132
133Windows
134-------
135
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000136- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
137 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
138 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
139 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
140 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
141 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
142 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
143 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
144 the problem.
145
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000146Mac
147---
148
149
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000150What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
151=================================
152
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000153*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000154
155Core and builtins
156-----------------
157
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000158- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
159 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
160 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
161 sensitive code.
162
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000163- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
164 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
165 @staticmethod
166 def foo(bar):
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000167 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000168
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000169- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
170 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
171 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
172 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
173 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
174 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
175 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
176 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
177 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
178 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
179 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
180
181 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
182 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
183 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
184 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
185 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
186 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
187 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
188
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000189- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
190 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
191
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000192- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000193 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000194
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000195- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000196 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000197 which was missing for no apparent reason.
198
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000199- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000200 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
201 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
202
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000203- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
204 types that support garbage collection.
205
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000206- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
207
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000208- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
209 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
210 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
211 Jython.
212
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000213- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
214
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000215- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
216 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
217
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000218- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
219 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
220 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000221
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000222- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
223 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
224 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
225
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000226Extension modules
227-----------------
228
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000229- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
230
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000231Library
232-------
233
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000234- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
235 TIS-620
236
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000237- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
238 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
239 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
240 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
241 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
242 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
243 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
244 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
245 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
246 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
247
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000248- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
249
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000250- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
251 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
252 same as when the argument is omitted).
253 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
254
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000255- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
256
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000257- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
258 schemes are offered.
259
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000260- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
261
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000262- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
263 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
264 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
265
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000266- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
267
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000268- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
269 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
270
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000271- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
272 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
273 when dummy_threading is being used.
274
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000275- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
276 from a tarfile.
277
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000278- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000279 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000280
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000281- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
282 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
283 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
284 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
285
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000286- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
287 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
288
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000289- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
290 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
291 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
292 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
293 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
294 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
295 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
296 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
297 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
298 by some other method in progress).
299
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000300- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
301 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
302 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000303
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000304- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
305
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000306- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
307 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
308 AM Kuchling.
309
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000310- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
311 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
312 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
313
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000314- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
315 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
316 instead of unsigned.
317
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000318- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000319 no longer part of the public API.
320
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000321- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
322 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
323 string methods of the same name).
324
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000325- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000326 SF patch 945642.
327
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000328- doctest unittest integration improvements:
329
330 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
331
332 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
333 DocTestSuites.
334
335- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
336 that provide thread-local data.
337
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000338- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
339 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
340
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000341- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
342
343- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
344 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
345 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
346
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000347- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
348
349 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
350 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
351 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000352
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000353 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
354 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
355 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
356 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
357
358 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
359 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
360
361 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
362 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
363 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
364 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
365
366 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
367 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
368 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
369 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
370 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
371
372 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
373 wrapping help output.
374
375 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
376 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
377 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000378
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000379C API
380-----
381
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000382- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
383 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
384 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
385 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
386 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
387 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
388 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
389 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
390 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
391 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
392 its visible semantics have not changed.
393
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000394- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
395 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
396
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000397Documentation
398-------------
399
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000400- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000401
402 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000403 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000404
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000405 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000406
407 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
408
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000409- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000410
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000411Tests
412-----
413
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000414- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000415 platforms that use the Makefile.
416
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000417- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
418 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
419 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
420
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000421
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000422What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
423=================================
424
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000425*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000426
427Core and builtins
428-----------------
429
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000430- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
431 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
432 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
433 objects now (one object instead of three).
434
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000435- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
436 Windows DLLs.
437
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000438- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
439 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000440
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000441- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
442 a new .pyc magic.
443
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000444- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
445 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
446 be there.
447
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000448- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
449 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
450 the LC_NUMERIC category.
451
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000452- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
453 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
454 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
455
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000456- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
457
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000458- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
459 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
460 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000461
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000462- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
463 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
464
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000465- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
466
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000467- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000468 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000469
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000470- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
471
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000472- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
473
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000474- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
475 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
476
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000477- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
478 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
479 Fixes bug #858016 .
480
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000481- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
482 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
483 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
484
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000485- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
486 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
487 improves their performance (about 35%).
488
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000489- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
490 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
491 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
492
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000493- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
494 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
495 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
496 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
497
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000498- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
499 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
500 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
501 length is not known).
502
503- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
504 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000505 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
506 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000507 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
508
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000509- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
510 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
511
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000512- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
513 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
514 keyword arguments.
515
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000516- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
517 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
518 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
519
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000520- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
521 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
522 cases.
523
524- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
525 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
526 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
527 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
528 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
529 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
530 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
531 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
532 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
533 a release build.
534
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000535- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
536 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
537
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000538- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000539 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000540
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000541- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
542 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
543 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
544 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
545 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
546 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
547 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
548 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
549 destroyed.
550
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000551- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
552 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
553 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
554 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
555 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
556 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
557 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
558 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
559
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000560- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
561 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
562 character other than a space.
563
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000564- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
565 by the function object or by the method object, the function
566 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
567 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
568 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
569 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
570 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
571 attributes with the same name.
572
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000573- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
574 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
575 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
576 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
577 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
578 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
579 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
580 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
581 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
582 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
583 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
584 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
585 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
586 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000587
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000588- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
589 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
590 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
591 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
592 This has been repaired.
593
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000594- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
595
596- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
597
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000598- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
599 over a sequence.
600
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000601- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000602 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000603
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000604- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
605
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000606- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
607 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
608 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
609 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
610 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
611 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
612 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
613 records with equal keys is unchanged).
614
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000615- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
616 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
617 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
618
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000619- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
620 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
621 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
622 freelist.
623
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000624- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
625 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
626
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000627- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
628 number.
629
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000630- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
631 a TypeError exception.
632
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000633- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
634 820195.
635
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000636- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
637 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
638 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
639
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000640- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000641 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
642 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000643
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000644- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
645 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
646 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
647
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000648- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
649 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000650 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000651
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000652- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000653 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
654 the first call.
655
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000656
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000657Extension modules
658-----------------
659
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000660- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
661 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
662
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000663- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
664 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
665 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
666 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
667 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
668 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
669 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000670
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000671- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
672
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000673- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
674
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000675- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
676 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
677
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000678- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
679 fewer false positives.
680
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000681- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
682 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
683
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000684- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000685 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
686
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000687- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000688 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000689 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
690 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
691 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000692
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000693- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
694 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
695 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
696 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
697
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000698- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
699 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
700 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
701 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
702 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
703 #897625.
704
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000705- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
706 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
707
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000708- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
709 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
710 and pops on either side of the deque.
711
712- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
713 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
714
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000715- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
716 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
717 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
718 other functions that expect a function argument.
719
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000720- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
721
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000722- os.getsid was added.
723
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000724- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
725 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
726 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
727
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000728- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
729
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000730- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
731
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000732- readline.clear_history was added.
733
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000734- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
735
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000736- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
737
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000738- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
739
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000740- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
741
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000742- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
743
744- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
745
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000746- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
747
748- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
749
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000750- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
751 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
752 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
753
754- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
755 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
756 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
757 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
758 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
759 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
760 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
761
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000762- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
763 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
764 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
765 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000766
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000767- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000768 iterators from a single iterable.
769
770- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
771 of raising a TypeError exception.
772
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000773- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
774 as parameter.
775
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000776Library
777-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000778
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000779- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
780 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
781 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000782
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000783- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
784 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
785 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000786
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000787- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000788
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000789- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
790 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000791
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000792- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
793 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
794
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000795- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
796
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000797- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000798 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000799
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000800- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
801 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
802
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000803- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
804
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000805- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
806 on cygwin and mingw32.
807
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000808- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
809
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000810- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
811 module.
812
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000813- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
814 installation scheme for all platforms.
815
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000816- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000817 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000818
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000819- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
820 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
821 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
822
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000823- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
824 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
825 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
826
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000827- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
828
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000829- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
830
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000831- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
832 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
833
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000834- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
835 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
836 type pattern with the same value exists.
837
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000838- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
839 when run from the command prompt).
840
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000841- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
842 not taken into consideration when caching value.
843
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000844- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
845 default sort).
846
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000847- Added global runctx function to profile module
848
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000849- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
850
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000851- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
852
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000853- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
854
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000855- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000856 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
857 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
858 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
859 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
860 accordingly.
861
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000862- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
863 decoding standards.
864
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000865- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
866 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
867 called for all requests.
868
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000869- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
870 they are passed to the compiler.
871
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000872- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
873 indent, width and depth.
874
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000875- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
876 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
877
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000878- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
879 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
880
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000881- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
882
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000883- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
884
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000885- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
886
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000887- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
888 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
889
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000890- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000891 for better performance.
892
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000893- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000894
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000895- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
896 a string).
897
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000898- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
899
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000900- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
901
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000902- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
903
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000904- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
905
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000906- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
907 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
908 list of fieldnames.
909
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000910- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
911 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
912
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000913- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
914
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000915- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
916 empty lists.
917
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000918- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
919 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
920 and shelves.
921
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000922- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
923 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
924
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000925- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000926 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
927 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000928
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000929- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
930 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000931 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000932
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000933- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000934 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
935 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
936
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000937- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
938 and removed in Py2.4.
939
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000940- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
941
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000942- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
943
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000944Tools/Demos
945-----------
946
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000947- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
948 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
949
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000950- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
951
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000952- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
953 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
954 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
955 destination in situations where both files are given.
956
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000957- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
958 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
959 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
960 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
961
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000962- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
963
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000964- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
965 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
966 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
967 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
968 now.
969
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000970- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
971 in effect
972
973- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
974 C-c C-h
975
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000976- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
977 -d option was given.
978
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000979Build
980-----
981
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000982- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
983 build under OS X.
984
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000985- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
986 --enable-profiling.
987
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000988- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
989 is configured --with-tsc.
990
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000991- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
992 on AMD64.
993
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000994- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
995 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
996
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000997- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
998 removed.
999
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001000- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1001 supported (see PEP 11).
1002
1003- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1004
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001005- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1006
1007- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1008 (see PEP 11).
1009
1010- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1011 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1012
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001013C API
1014-----
1015
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001016- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1017 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1018 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1019
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001020- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1021 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1022 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1023 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1024
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001025- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1026 generator objects.
1027
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001028- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1029 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001030 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1031 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001032
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001033- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1034 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1035
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001036- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1037 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1038 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1039 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1040 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1041
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001042- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1043 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1044 about 10% faster.
1045
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001046- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1047 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1048
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001049- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1050 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1051 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1052 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1053
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001054Windows
1055-------
1056
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001057- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1058 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1059 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1060 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1061
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001062- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1063 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1064 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1065
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001066
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001067What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1068===============================
1069
1070*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1071
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001072IDLE
1073----
1074
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001075- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1076 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1077 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1078 context-menu actions.
1079
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001080- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1081 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1082 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1083 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1084 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1085 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1086 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1087 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1088 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1089
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001090
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001091What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1092=============================================
1093
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001094*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001095
1096Core and builtins
1097-----------------
1098
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001099- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001100 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001101 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1102
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001103Extension modules
1104-----------------
1105
1106- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1107 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1108 than once. This has been fixed.
1109
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001110- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1111 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1112 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1113 call.
1114
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001115- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1116
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001117Library
1118-------
1119
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001120- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1121 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1122
1123- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1124 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1125 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1126 restored.
1127
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001128IDLE
1129----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001130
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001131- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001132
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001133Build
1134-----
1135
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001136- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1137 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1138
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001139C API
1140-----
1141
1142Windows
1143-------
1144
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001145- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1146 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1147
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001148- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1149
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001150Mac
1151---
1152
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001153- Various fixes to pimp.
1154
1155- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1156
1157- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1158 more problems than it solves.
1159
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001160
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001161What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1162=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001163
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001164*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1165
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001166Core and builtins
1167-----------------
1168
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001169- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1170 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1171
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001172- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1173 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001174 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001175
1176- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1177 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1178 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001179 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001180
1181- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1182 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001183
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001184- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1185 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1186 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1187
1188- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001189 770247.
1190
1191- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001192
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001193Extension modules
1194-----------------
1195
1196- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1197 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1198
1199- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1200
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001201- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1202
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001203- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1204 contained within the _strptime module.
1205
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001206- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1207 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1208
1209- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001210 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1211
1212- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1213 the find_class attribute, if present.
1214
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001215- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001216
1217 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1218 (SF bug 763298).
1219
1220 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001221 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1222 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1223 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001224
1225 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1226
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001227Library
1228-------
1229
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001230- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1231
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001232- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1233 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1234 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1235 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1236 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1237 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1238 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1239 or Tester().
1240
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001241- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1242 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1243 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1244 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1245 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1246 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1247 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1248 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1249 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001250
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001251 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001252
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001253- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1254 weren't before was an oversight.
1255
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001256- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1257 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1258
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001259- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1260 when there are no lines.
1261
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001262- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1263 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1264
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001265- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1266 to child processes.
1267
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001268- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1269
1270- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1271
1272- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1273 xmlrpclib.
1274
1275- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1276 responses.
1277
1278- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1279 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1280
1281- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1282 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1283 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1284
1285- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1286 used as patterns.
1287
1288- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1289 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1290 than Tk 8.3.
1291
1292- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1293
1294- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001295
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001296Tools/Demos
1297-----------
1298
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001299- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1300
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001301- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1302
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001303- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001304
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001305Build
1306-----
1307
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001308- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1309
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001310- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1311
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001312- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1313 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001314
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001315- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1316 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1317 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001318
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001319C API
1320-----
1321
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001322- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1323 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1324
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001325Windows
1326-------
1327
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001328- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1329 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1330 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1331 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1332 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1333 Python exception ::
1334
1335 thread.error: can't start new thread
1336
1337 is raised now.
1338
1339- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1340 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1341 instead of from DLL teardown.
1342
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001343Mac
1344---
1345
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001346- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001347 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001348 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1349 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1350 the executable in the bundle.
1351
1352- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001353
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001354- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1355
1356- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1357 on Panther.
1358
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001359What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1360================================
1361
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001362*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001363
1364Core and builtins
1365-----------------
1366
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001367- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1368 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1369 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1370 with the -i option.
1371
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001372- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1373 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1374
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001375- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1376 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1377
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001378- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1379 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1380 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1381 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1382 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1383 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1384 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1385 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1386 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1387 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1388 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1389 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1390 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001391
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001392- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1393 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1394 embedded in a lambda expression.
1395
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001396- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1397 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1398 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1399 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1400 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1401
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001402- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1403 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1404 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1405
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001406- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1407 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1408
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001409- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1410 It's writable again.
1411
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001412- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1413 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1414 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001415 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001416
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001417- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1418 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1419 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1420
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001421Extension modules
1422-----------------
1423
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001424- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1425 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1426
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001427- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1428 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1429 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1430 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1431
1432- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1433 collection.
1434
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001435- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1436 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1437 unique within a single program run.
1438
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001439- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1440 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1441
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001442- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1443 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1444
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001445- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1446 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001447
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001448- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1449
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001450- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1451 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1452
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001453- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1454 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1455 for many BSD-derived systems.
1456
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001457
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001458Library
1459-------
1460
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001461- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1462 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1463 primary ones:
1464
1465 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1466 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1467 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1468
1469 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1470 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1471 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1472 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1473 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1474 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1475
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001476- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1477 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1478 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1479 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1480 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1481 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1482 argument.
1483
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001484- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1485 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1486 in the archive.
1487
1488- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1489 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1490
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001491- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1492 569574).
1493
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001494- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1495 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1496 no more.
1497
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001498- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1499 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1500 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1501 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1502 code coverage.
1503
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001504- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1505 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1506 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001507 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1508 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001509
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001510- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1511 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1512 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001513 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001514
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001515- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1516
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001517- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1518 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1519 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1520 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1521
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001522- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1523 handling.
1524
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001525- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1526 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1527
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001528- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1529 in socket.py.
1530
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001531- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1532
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001533- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1534 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1535 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1536 opener with proxy support.
1537
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001538- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1539
1540- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1541
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001542Tools/Demos
1543-----------
1544
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001545- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1546
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001547- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1548
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001549- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1550 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001551
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001552- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1553 files.
1554
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001555Build
1556-----
1557
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001558- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001559 different root directory.
1560
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001561C API
1562-----
1563
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001564- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1565 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1566 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1567 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1568 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1569 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1570 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1571 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1572 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1573 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1574
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001575- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1576 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1577 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1578 from Python.
1579
1580
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001581New platforms
1582-------------
1583
1584None this time.
1585
1586Tests
1587-----
1588
1589- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1590 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1591
1592Windows
1593-------
1594
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001595- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1596
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001597- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1598 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1599 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1600 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1601 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1602 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1603 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1604 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1605 that's what it's for.
1606
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001607Mac
1608---
1609
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001610- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1611 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1612 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1613 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001614- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1615 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1616- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001617
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001618SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1619------------------------------------
1620
1621430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1622598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1623622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1624661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1625683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1626697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1627713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1628724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1629727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1630729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1631730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1632731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1633732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1634733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1635735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1636740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1637744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1638745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1639747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1640749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1641751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1642753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1643755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1644757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1645760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1646
1647
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001648What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1649================================
1650
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001651*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001652
1653Core and builtins
1654-----------------
1655
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001656- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1657 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1658
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001659- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1660 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1661 and cannot be strings).
1662
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001663- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1664 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1665 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1666 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1667
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001668- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1669 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1670 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1671 Python itself.
1672
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001673- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1674 the referenced object, if it has one.
1675
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001676- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1677 the thread started at
1678 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1679
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001680- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1681 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1682 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1683 placed on a list index.
1684
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001685- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1686 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1687 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1688 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1689
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001690- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1691 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1692 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1693 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1694 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1695 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1696 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1697
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001698- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1699 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1700 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1701 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1702 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1703
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001704- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1705 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001706
1707- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1708 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1709 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1710 #693195.)
1711
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001712- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1713 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001714
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001715- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001716 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001717 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1718 interpreter executions, would fail.
1719
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001720- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001721 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001722 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001723
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001724Extension modules
1725-----------------
1726
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001727- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1728 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1729 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1730 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1731
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001732- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1733 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1734
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001735- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1736 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1737 and Greg Chapman.)
1738
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001739- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1740 recursively.
1741
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001742- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001743 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1744 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1745 leaks.
1746
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001747- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1748
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001749- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1750 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1751 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1752 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1753 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1754 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1755 #705836.
1756
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001757- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001758 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1759
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001760- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1761 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1762 See SF bug #692416.
1763
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001764- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1765 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1766
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001767- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1768 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1769 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001770
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001771- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001772 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1773 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1774
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001775- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1776 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1777 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1778 timeouts to work properly.
1779
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001780Library
1781-------
1782
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001783- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1784 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1785 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1786 future release.
1787
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001788- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1789 for querying platform dependent features.
1790
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001791- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001792
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001793- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1794 pickle protocol versions.
1795
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001796- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1797 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1798 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1799
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001800- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1801
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001802- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1803 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1804 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1805 modules.
1806
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001807- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1808 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1809 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1810
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001811- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1812 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1813
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001814- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1815 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1816 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1817
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001818- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001819 MS Office extensions.
1820
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001821- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1822 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1823
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001824- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1825 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1826
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001827- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1828 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1829 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1830 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1831 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1832 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1833
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001834- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1835 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1836 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001837
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001838- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1839 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1840 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1841
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001842- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1843
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001844- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1845 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1846 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1847
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001848Tools/Demos
1849-----------
1850
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001851- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1852 See the module docstring for details.
1853
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001854Build
1855-----
1856
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001857- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1858 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001859
1860C API
1861-----
1862
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001863- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1864
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001865- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1866 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1867 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1868
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001869- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1870 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001871
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001872 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1873 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1874 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001875
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001876- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001877 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1878
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001879- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1880 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1881 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001882
1883New platforms
1884-------------
1885
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001886None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001887
1888Tests
1889-----
1890
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001891- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1892 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001893
1894Windows
1895-------
1896
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001897- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1898 function.
1899
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001900- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1901 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001902
1903Mac
1904---
1905
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001906- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1907 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001908
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001909- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1910 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001911
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001912- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1913 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1914 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001915
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001916- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001917 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1918 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001919
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001920- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1921 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001922
1923
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001924What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1925=================================
1926
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001927*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001928
1929Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001930-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001931
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001932- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1933 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1934 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1935
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001936- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1937 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1938 (SF patch #664376.)
1939
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001940- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1941 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1942 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1943 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1944 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1945 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001946 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001947
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001948- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1949 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1950 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1951 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001952 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001953
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001954- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1955 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1956 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1957 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1958 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1959 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1960 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1961 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1962 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1963 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1964 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1965
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001966- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1967 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1968 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1969 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1970 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1971 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1972
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001973- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1974 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1975
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001976- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1977 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1978 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1979 case.)
1980
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001981- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1982 passed as unicode strings.
1983
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001984- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1985 See SF bug #683467.
1986
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001987- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1988 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1989
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001990- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1991
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001992- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1993
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001994- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1995 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1996 arguments.
1997
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001998- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1999 See SF bug #667147.
2000
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002001- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002002 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002003 See SF bug #676155.
2004
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002005- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002006 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002007 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2008 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2009 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2010 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2011 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2012 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002013
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002014Extension modules
2015-----------------
2016
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002017- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2018 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2019 tp_as_number pointer.
2020
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002021- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2022 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2023 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2024 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2025 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2026
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002027- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2028
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002029- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2030
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002031- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002032 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002033 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2034 patch #678531.)
2035
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002036- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2037 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2038
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002039- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2040 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2041
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002042- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2043
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002044- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2045 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2046 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2047
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002048- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2049
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002050- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2051 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2052
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002053- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002054
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002055- datetime changes:
2056
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002057 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2058
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002059 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2060 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2061 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2062 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2063 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2064 now.
2065
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002066 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002067 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2068 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002069
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002070 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002071 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002072 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2073 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2074 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2075 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002076
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002077 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2078 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2079 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002080 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2081
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002082 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2083 by a later example coded by Guido.
2084
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002085 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002086 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2087 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2088 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002089 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2090 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2091
2092 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2093 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2094 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2095 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2096 tzinfo subclass instance.
2097
2098 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2099 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2100 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2101 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2102 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2103 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2104 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2105 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002106
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002107 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2108 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2109 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2110 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2111 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002112 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2113
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002114 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002115
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002116 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2117 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2118 as a naive datetime object.
2119
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002120 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2121 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2122 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2123
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002124 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2125 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2126 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2127 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2128 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2129 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2130 comparison.
2131
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002132 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2133 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2134 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2135 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002136 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002137
2138 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002139
2140 and ::
2141
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002142 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2143
2144 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2145 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2146 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2147 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2148
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002149 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2150 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2151 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2152 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2153 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2154
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002155 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2156 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002157 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2158 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002159
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002160Library
2161-------
2162
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002163- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2164 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2165
2166- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2167 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2168 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2169 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2170 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2171 See PEP 307 for details.
2172
2173- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2174 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2175
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002176- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2177 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002178 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002179 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2180 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002181 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002182
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002183- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2184 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2185
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002186- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2187 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2188 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2189
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002190- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2191
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002192- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2193 exception.
2194
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002195- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2196 class.
2197
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002198- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2199 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2200 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2201
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002202- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2203 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2204
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002205- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002206 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2207 See SF bug #659228.
2208
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002209- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2210 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2211 See SF patch #651082.
2212
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002213- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002214
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002215- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2216 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2217
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002218- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002219 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002220
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002221- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2222 DOS paths from other platforms.
2223
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002224Tools/Demos
2225-----------
2226
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002227- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2228 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2229 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2230 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2231 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2232 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2233 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2234 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2235 example:
2236
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002237 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2238 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002239
2240 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2241
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002242
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002243Build
2244-----
2245
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002246- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2247 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2248 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002249 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2250
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002251 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2252
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002253- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2254 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2255 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2256 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2257 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2258 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2259 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2260 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2261 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2262
2263- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2264 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2265 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2266 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2267
2268- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2269 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2270
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002271C API
2272-----
2273
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002274- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2275 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002276
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002277- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2278 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2279 tp_as_number pointer.
2280
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002281- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2282 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2283 (SF #681367)
2284
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002285- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2286 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2287 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2288 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002289
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002290Tests
2291-----
2292
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002293- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002294 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2295 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2296 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2297 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2298 pydoc.)
2299
2300- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2301
2302- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002303
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002304Windows
2305-------
2306
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002307- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2308 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2309 time).
2310
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002311- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2312 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2313
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002314- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2315 release without strong cryptography.
2316
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002317- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002318 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002319
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002320- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2321 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2322
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002323Mac
2324---
2325
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002326- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2327 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002328
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002329- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2330 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2331 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002332
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002333- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2334 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002335
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002336- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2337 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2338 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2339 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002340
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002341- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002342 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2343 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2344 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002345
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002346
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002347What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002348=================================
2349
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002350*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002351
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002352Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002353--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002354
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002355- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2356
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002357- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2358 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002359 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002360 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002361 a different meaning than before.
2362
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002363- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002364 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002365 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002366
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002367- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002368 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002369 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002370
2371- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2372 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2373 and deallocation.
2374
2375- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2376 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2377
2378- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2379 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2380 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2381 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2382 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2383
2384- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2385 now detected by the garbage collector.
2386
2387- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2388 [SF bug 519621]
2389
2390- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2391 identifier.
2392
2393- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2394 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2395 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2396 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2397 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2398 [SF bug 563060]
2399
2400- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2401 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2402 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2403 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2404 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2405
2406- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2407 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2408 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2409
2410- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2411
2412- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2413 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2414 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2415 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2416 state of the slots would be lost.)
2417
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002418Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002419-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002420
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002421- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002422 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2423 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2424 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2425 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002426 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2427 Jython 2.1.
2428
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002429- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002430 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002431 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2432 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2433 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2434 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2435 these, see PEP 302.
2436
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002437- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2438 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2439 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2440
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002441- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2442 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2443 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2444
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002445- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2446 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2447 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2448
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002449- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2450 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2451 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2452 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2453 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2454 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2455 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2456 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2457 releases or implementations.
2458
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002459- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002460 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2461 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002462
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002463- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2464 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2465
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002466- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2467 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2468 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2469
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002470- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2471 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2472
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002473- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2474 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002475 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2476 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002477
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002478- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2479 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2480 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2481 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2482 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2483
2484 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2485 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2486 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2487 pattern.
2488
2489 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2490 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2491 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2492 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2493
2494 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2495 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2496 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2497 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2498 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2499 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2500
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002501- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2502 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2503 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2504 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2505 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2506 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2507 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2508 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002509
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002510- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2511 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2512 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2513 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2514 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002515 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2516 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2517 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2518 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2519 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2520 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2521 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002522
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002523- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2524 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2525
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002526- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2527 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2528 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2529 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2530 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2531 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2532 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2533 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2534 to Zack Weinberg!
2535
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002536- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2537 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2538 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2539 type. This has been fixed now.
2540
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002541- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2542 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2543 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2544
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002545- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2546 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2547 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2548 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2549 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2550 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2551 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2552 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002553 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002554
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002555- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2556 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2557 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002558
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002559- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2560 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2561 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2562 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2563 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2564 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2565 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2566 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002567 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002568 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2569 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2570
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002571- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2572 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2573 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2574 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2575 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2576 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2577 this.)
2578
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002579- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2580 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002581 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002582 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002583 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2584 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002585 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2586 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002587
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002588- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2589 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2590 currently running.
2591
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002592- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2593 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2594 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2595 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2596
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002597- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2598 as directory names.
2599
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002600- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2601 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2602
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002603- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2604 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2605
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002606- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002607 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2608 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002609
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002610- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2611 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2612 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2613 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2614 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2615
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002616- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2617 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2618 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2619 removed.
2620
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002621- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2622 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2623 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2624
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002625- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2626 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2627 to __debug__.
2628
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002629- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2630 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2631 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2632
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002633- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2634 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2635 deprecated now.
2636
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002637- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2638 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2639 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002640
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002641- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2642 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2643 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2644 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2645 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002646
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002647- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2648 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2649
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002650- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2651 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2652 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002653 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002654 is backward compatible.
2655
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002656- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2657 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2658 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2659 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2660 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2661
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002662- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2663 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2664 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2665 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2666 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2667 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002668
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002669- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2670 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2671
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002672- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2673 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2674
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002675- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2676 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2677 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2678 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2679 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2680
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002681- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2682 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2683 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2684
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002685- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002686 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2687
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002688- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2689 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2690 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002691
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002692- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2693 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2694
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002695- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2696 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2697 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2698
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002699- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2700
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002701Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002702-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002703
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002704- Added three operators to the operator module:
2705 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2706 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2707 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2708
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002709- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2710
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002711- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2712 archives.
2713
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002714- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2715 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2716 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2717
2718 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2719
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002720- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2721 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2722 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002723 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002724
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002725- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2726 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2727 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2728 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002729 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2730 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2731 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2732 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002733
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002734- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2735 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002736
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002737- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2738
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002739- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2740 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2741
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002742- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2743 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2744 supported.
2745
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002746- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2747
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002748- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2749 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002750
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002751- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2752 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2753
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002754- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2755
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002756- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2757 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2758
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002759- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2760 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2761 functions but callable type objects.
2762
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002763- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002764 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002765 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002766
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002767- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2768 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002769
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002770- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2771 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002772
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002773- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2774 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2775 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2776 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2777
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002778- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2779 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002780
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002781- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2782 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2783 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2784 and __imul__.
2785
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002786- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002787 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2788 is called.
2789
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002790- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2791 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2792 interpreter was compiled.
2793
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002794- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2795 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2796 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002797 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002798 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2799 1, not 2.
2800
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002801- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2802 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2803 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2804 limit.
2805
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002806- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2807 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2808 bug #623464.
2809
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002810- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2811 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2812 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2813 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2814
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002815Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002816-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002817
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002818- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2819
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002820- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2821 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2822 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2823 with Python 2.3a2.
2824
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002825- os.path exposes getctime.
2826
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002827- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002828 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002829 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002830 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002831 unit tests of floating point results.
2832
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002833- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2834 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2835 has been increased.
2836
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002837- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2838 executed.
2839
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002840- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2841 postinstallation script.
2842
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002843- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2844 test the current module.
2845
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002846- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002847 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2848 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2849 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2850 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2851
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002852- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002853 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002854 Ward's Optik package.
2855
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002856- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2857 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2858 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2859 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2860
2861- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2862 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002863 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002864
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002865- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2866 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2867 shelf are binary pickles.
2868
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002869- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2870 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2871
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002872- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2873 modules are iterators now.
2874
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002875- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2876 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2877 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2878 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2879 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2880 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002881
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002882- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2883 with their entity value.
2884
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002885- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2886
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002887- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2888 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002889
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002890- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2891 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002892 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002893
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002894- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2895 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2896 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2897 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2898 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2899 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2900 main():
2901
2902 import locale
2903 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2904
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002905- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2906 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2907
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002908- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2909 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2910 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2911 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2912 to the new standard.
2913
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002914- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2915 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2916 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2917 an extension to the database.
2918
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002919- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2920 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2921 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2922 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002923 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002924
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002925- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002926 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002927
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002928- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2929 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2930 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2931 bounded integers.
2932
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002933- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2934 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2935 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2936 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2937 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2938 in existence.
2939
2940 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2941 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2942 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2943 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2944 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2945 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2946
2947 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2948 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2949 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2950 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2951
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002952- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2953 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2954 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2955
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002956- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2957
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002958- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2959 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2960 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2961 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2962
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002963- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2964 argument.
2965
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002966- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2967 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2968 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2969 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2970 [SF patch 560794].
2971
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002972- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2973 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2974 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002975 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2976 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2977 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002978
2979- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2980 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002981
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002982- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2983 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2984 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2985 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002986
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002987- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2988 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2989 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2990 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2991 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2992
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002993- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002994
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002995- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2996
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002997- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2998 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2999 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3000 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3001 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3002 identical to None.
3003
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003004- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3005 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3006 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3007 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3008 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3009 results now.
3010
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003011- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3012 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3013
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003014- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3015 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3016 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3017 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3018 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3019 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3020 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3021 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3022
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003023- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3024
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003025- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3026 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3027
3028- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3029 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3030 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3031 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3032 and other systems.
3033
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003034- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3035 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3036 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3037 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 +00003038 work well with these.
3039
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003040- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3041
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003042- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003043 connections.
3044
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003045- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3046 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3047 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3048
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003049- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3050 sets
3051
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003052- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3053 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3054 name.
3055
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003056- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3057 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3058 passed in.
3059
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003060- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003061 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003062 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3063 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003064
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003065- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3066
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003067- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3068
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003069- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3070 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3071 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3072
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003073- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3074 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3075 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3076 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003077 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003078
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003079- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003080 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003081 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003082
3083- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3084 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3085 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3086
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003087- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003088 the value of its expression argument.
3089
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003090- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3091 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3092 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3093
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003094- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3095 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3096 skipstone browser was included.
3097
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003098- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3099 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3100
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003101Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003102-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003103
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003104- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3105 names in addition to accepting file names.
3106
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003107- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3108 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3109 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3110 still used and useful.)
3111
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003112- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3113 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3114 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3115 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003116
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003117- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3118 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3119 the generated binary.
3120
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003121Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003122-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003123
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003124- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3125
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003126- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3127 except in the hands of experts.
3128
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003129- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003130 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3131 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3132 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003133
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003134- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3135 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3136 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3137 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3138 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3139 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3140 builds.
3141
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003142- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3143 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3144 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3145 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3146 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3147 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3148 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3149 new type.
3150
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003151- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003152
3153 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3154 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3155 positive infinities.
3156
3157 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3158 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3159 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3160 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3161 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3162 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3163 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3164
3165 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3166
3167 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3168
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003169- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3170 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3171 size of the executable.
3172
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003173- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3174 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3175 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3176 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003177
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003178- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3179
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003180- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3181 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3182 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003183
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003184- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3185 well as Unix.
3186
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003187- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3188 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3189 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3190 modules in the README file for details.
3191
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003192C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003193-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003194
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003195- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3196 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003197 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003198 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003199 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003200
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003201- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3202 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3203 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3204 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3205 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3206 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003207 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003208 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3209 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3210 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3211 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3212 aligned.)
3213
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003214- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3215 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3216 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3217
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003218- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3219 level.
3220
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003221- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3222 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3223 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3224 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3225 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3226
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003227- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3228 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3229 code.
3230
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003231- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3232 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3233 adjusting for negative indices.
3234
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003235- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3236 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3237 object.
3238
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003239- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3240 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3241 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3242
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003243- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3244 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003245
3246- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3247
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003248- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3249 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3250 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3251 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3252
3253- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3254
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003255- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003256
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003257- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003258 without going through the buffer API.
3259
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003260- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003261
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003262- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3263 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3264 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3265 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3266
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003267- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3268 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3269
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003270- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003271 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3272
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003273New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003274-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003275
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003276- OpenVMS is now supported.
3277
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003278- AtheOS is now supported.
3279
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003280- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3281
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003282- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3283
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003284Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003285-----
3286
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003287- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3288 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3289 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003290
3291Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003292-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003293
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003294- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3295 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3296 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3297 bugs.
3298 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003299 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003300 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3301 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003302 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003303
3304- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003305 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003306
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003307- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3308 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3309
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003310- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3311 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003312 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003313 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3314
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003315- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3316 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3317 use files" uninstall option).
3318
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003319- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3320
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003321- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3322 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3323
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003324- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3325 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3326 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3327
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003328- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3329 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3330 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3331 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3332 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003333 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3334 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3335 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003336
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003337- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003338 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003339 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3340 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3341 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3342 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3343 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3344 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3345 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3346 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3347 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3348 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3349 work around.
3350
3351- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3352 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3353 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3354 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3355 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3356 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3357 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3358 specified with O_CREAT too).
3359
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003360Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003361----
3362
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003363- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003364
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003365- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3366 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3367 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3368
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003369- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3370 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3371 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3372
3373- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3374 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3375 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3376 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3377 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3378 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3379 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3380 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003381
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003382- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3383 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3384 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003385
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003386- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3387 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3388 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3389 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3390 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003391
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003392- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3393 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3394 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003395
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003396- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3397 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003398
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003399- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3400 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3401 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3402 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3403 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003404
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003405- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3406 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3407 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3408
3409- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3410 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3411 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003412
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003413- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3414 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3415 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3416 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003417 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003418
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003419- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3420 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003421
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003422- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3423 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003424
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003425- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003426 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003427 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3428 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003429
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003430
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003431What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003432===============================
3433
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003434*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3435
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003436Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003437--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003438
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003439- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3440 with a custom metaclass.
3441
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003442Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003443-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003444
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003445- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3446 are proxies.
3447
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003448Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003449-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003450
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003451- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3452 very short strings.
3453
3454- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3455 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3456 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3457 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3458 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3459
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003460Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003461-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003462
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003463- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3464 close or delete time).
3465
3466- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3467 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3468
3469- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3470
3471- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003472 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003473
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003474Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003475-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003476
3477Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003478-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003479
3480C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003481-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003482
3483New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003484-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003485
3486Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003487-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003488
3489Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003490-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003491
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003492- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3493
3494- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3495 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3496
3497- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3498 deleted at process exit time.
3499
3500- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3501 in backslash.
3502
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003503Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003504----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003505
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003506- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3507 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3508 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3509
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003510
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003511What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003512===========================
3513
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003514*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3515
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003516Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003517--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003518
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003519- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3520 been extensively updated. See
3521
3522 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3523
3524 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3525
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003526- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3527 deleted!
3528
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003529- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3530 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3531 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3532 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3533 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3534
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003535- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3536
3537 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3538 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3539
3540 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3541 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3542 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3543 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3544 supported anyway.
3545
3546 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3547 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3548
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003549- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3550 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3551 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3552 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3553 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003554
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003555- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3556 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3557 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3558
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003559Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003560-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003561
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003562- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3563 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3564 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3565 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3566 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3567 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003568 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3569 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3570 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3571 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003572
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003573- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3574 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3575 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3576
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003577Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003578-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003579
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003580- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3581
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003582Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003583-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003584
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003585- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3586 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3587 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3588 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3589 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3590 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3591
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003592- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3593
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003594- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3595
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003596- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3597
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003598- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3599 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3600 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3601
3602- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3603
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003604Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003605-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003606
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003607- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3608 off a search on Google.
3609
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003610Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003611-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003612
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003613- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3614 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3615 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3616 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3617 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3618 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3619 other platforms should do likewise.
3620
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003621- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3622 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3623 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3624
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003625C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003626-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003627
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003628- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3629 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3630 producing key-value pairs.
3631
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003632- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003633 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003634 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3635 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3636 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3637 previously went unchallenged.
3638
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003639New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003640-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003641
3642Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003643-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003644
3645Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003646-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003647
3648Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003649----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003650
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003651- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3652 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003653
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003654- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3655 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3656 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3657 home.
3658
3659
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003660What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003661===========================
3662
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003663*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3664
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003665Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003666--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003667
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003668- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3669 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003670
3671 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003672 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003673
3674 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3675 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003676 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003677 This needs to be documented.
3678
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003679- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3680 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3681
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003682- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3683 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3684 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3685
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003686- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3687 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3688
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003689- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3690 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3691 class forbids it).
3692
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003693- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3694 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3695 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3696
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003697- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3698
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003699Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003700-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003701
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003702- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3703 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003704 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003705
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003706- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3707 (like 1 + '').
3708
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003709Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003710-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003711
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003712- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3713 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3714 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3715 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003716 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003717 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3718
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003719- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3720 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3721 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3722 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3723
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003724- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3725 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003726 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3727 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3728 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003729
3730- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3731 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003732
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003733- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3734 bytes on its input.
3735
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003736Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003737-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003738
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003739- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003740 convenience function.
3741
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003742- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3743 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3744 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003745 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3746 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3747 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3748 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3749 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3750 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003751
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003752- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3753 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3754 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3755 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3756
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003757- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3758 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3759 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3760
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003761- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3762 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3763 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3764 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3765
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003766- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3767 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003768 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003769 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3770 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3771 new -l and -e options.
3772
3773- statcache is now deprecated.
3774
3775- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3776 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003777 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003778 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3779 time properly taken into account.
3780
3781- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3782 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3783 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3784 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3785
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003786Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003787-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003788
3789Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003790-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003791
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003792- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3793 is built with libdb3 if available.
3794
3795- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3796
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003797C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003798-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003799
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003800- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3801 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3802 PySequence_Size().
3803
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003804- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3805
3806- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3807 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3808 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3809
3810- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3811 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3812
3813- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3814 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3815
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003816New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003817-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003818
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003819- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3820 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3821
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003822- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3823 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3824
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003825- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3826
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003827Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003828-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003829
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003830- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3831 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3832
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003833Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003834-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003835
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003836Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003837----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003838
3839- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3840 removed completely in the next release.
3841
3842- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3843 OSX.
3844
3845- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3846 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3847
3848- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3849
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003850
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003851What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003852===========================
3853
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003854*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3855
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003856Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003857--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003858
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003859- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003860 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003861 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003862 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3863 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003864 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3865 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003866 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3867 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003868
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003869- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3870 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3871
3872- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3873 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3874
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003875Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003876-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003877
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003878- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3879 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3880 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3881 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3882 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3883 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3884 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3885 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3886
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003887- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3888 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3889 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3890 example).
3891
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003892- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003893 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003894 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003895 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003896
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003897- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3898 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3899 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003900 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003901
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003902- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3903 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3904 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3905 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3906 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3907 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3908
3909 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3910
3911 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3912
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003913Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003914-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003915
3916- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3917
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003918- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3919
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003920- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3921 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003922
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003923- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3924 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3925 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3926 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3927 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3928 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003929 attributes.
3930
3931- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3932 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3933 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003934
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003935- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3936 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3937 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003938
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003939- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3940 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3941 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003942 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3943 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3944
3945- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3946 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003947
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003948Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003949-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003950
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003951- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3952 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3953
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003954- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3955 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3956 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3957 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3958
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003959- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3960 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3961 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3962 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3963
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003964 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3965 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3966 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3967 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3968 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3969 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3970 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3971 without losing information).
3972
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003973- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003974 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3975 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3976 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3977 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3978 module).
3979
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003980 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003981 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3982 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3983 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3984 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003985
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003986- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003987 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3988 encoding.
3989
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003990- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3991 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3992
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003993- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003994 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3995
3996- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3997 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3998 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3999 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4000
4001- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4002
4003- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4004 ON, and OFF.
4005
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004006- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4007 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4008
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004009Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004010-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004011
4012- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4013 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4014 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004015
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004016- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4017 been added: -X and -E.
4018
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004019Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004020-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004021
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004022- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4023 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4024
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004025C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004026-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004027
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004028- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4029 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4030 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4031 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4032 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4033
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004034- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4035 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4036 as long) arguments.
4037
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004038- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4039 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4040 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4041 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4042 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4043 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4044
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004045- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4046 input.
4047
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004048New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004049-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004050
4051Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004052-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004053
4054Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004055-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004056
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004057- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4058 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4059 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4060
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004061- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4062 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4063 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004064 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004065
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004066 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4067 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4068 import signal
4069 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004070
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004071 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004072 while 1:
4073 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004074 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004075 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4076 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4077 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4078 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004079
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004080
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004081What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4082===========================
4083
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004084*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4085
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004086Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004087--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004088
4089- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4090 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4091 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4092
4093- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4094 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4095 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4096 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4097 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4098 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4099 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004100
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004101- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004102 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004103 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4104 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4105 associate a docstring with a property.
4106
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004107- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4108 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4109 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4110 other built-in object types.
4111
4112- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4113 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4114 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4115 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4116 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4117
4118- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4119 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4120
4121- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4122 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004123 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004124 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4125 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4126 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4127 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4128 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4129
4130- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4131 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4132 class.
4133
4134- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4135 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4136 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4137 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4138
4139- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4140 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4141 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4142 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4143
4144- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4145 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4146
4147- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4148 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4149 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4150 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4151 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004152 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004153 with the same value as s.
4154
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004155- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4156
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004157Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004158----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004159
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004160- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4161
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004162- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4163 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4164 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4165 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4166 objects.
4167
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004168- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4169 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004170 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4171 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4172
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004173- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4174 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4175 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4176
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004177Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004178-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004179
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004180- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4181 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4182 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4183 by the instances.
4184
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004185- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4186 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4187 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4188
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004189- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4190 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4191 before the entire comparison is complete.
4192
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004193- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4194 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4195 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4196
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004197- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4198 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4199 getwriter().
4200
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004201- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4202 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4203
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004204- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004205 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4206 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4207
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004208- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4209 iterable object.
4210
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004211- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4212 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004213
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004214- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4215 authentication.
4216
4217- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4218 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004219
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004220- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004221 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4222 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4223 a sample driver.)
4224
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004225Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004226-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004227
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004228- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4229 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4230 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4231 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4232 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4233 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4234 kernel has large file support.
4235
4236- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4237 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4238 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4239 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4240 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4241
4242- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4243 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4244 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4245
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004246C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004247-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004248
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004249- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4250 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4251
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004252New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004253-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004254
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004255- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4256 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4257
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004258Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004259-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004260
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004261- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4262 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4263 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4264 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4265 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4266
4267- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4268 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4269 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4270 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4271
4272- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4273 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4274
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004275Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004276-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004277
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004278- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004279 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4280 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004281
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004282
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004283What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4284===========================
4285
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004286*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4287
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004288Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004289----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004290
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004291- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4292 big to represent as a C double.
4293
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004294- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4295 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4296 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4297 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4298 restriction).
4299
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004300- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4301 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4302 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4303 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4304 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4305
4306 >>> dir([])
4307 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4308 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4309 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4310 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4311 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4312 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4313 'reverse', 'sort']
4314
4315 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4316
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004317- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004318 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4319 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4320 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4321 OverflowError exception.
4322
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004323- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004324 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004325 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4326 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4327 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4328 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4329 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004330 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004331 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4332 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4333
4334 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4335 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4336 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4337 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004338
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004339- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004340 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4341 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4342 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4343 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4344 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4345 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4346 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4347 once it is created.
4348
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004349- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4350 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4351 (key, value) pairs.
4352
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004353- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004354 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4355 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4356
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004357- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4358 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4359 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4360 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4361 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004362
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004363- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004364 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4365 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4366
4367 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4368
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004369- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004370 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4371
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004372Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004373-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004374
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004375- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004376 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4377 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004378
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004379- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4380 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4381 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4382 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4383 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4384 in this area anymore).
4385
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004386- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4387 threading.Timer.
4388
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004389- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4390 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4391
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004392- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004393 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4394
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004395- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004396 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4397 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4398 converted to Python longs.
4399
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004400- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004401 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4402
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004403- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4404 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4405 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4406
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004407Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004408-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004409
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004410- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4411 division operators as per PEP 238.
4412
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004413Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004414-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004415
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004416- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4417 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4418 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4419 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4420
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004421C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004422-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004423
4424- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004425
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004426- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4427 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004428 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004429
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004430 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4431 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004432 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004433 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004434
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004435- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004436 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4437 module:
4438
4439 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004440
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004441 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4442 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004443
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004444 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4445 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004446
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004447 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4448
4449 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4450
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004451- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004452 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4453 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4454 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004455
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004456New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004457-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004458
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004459- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4460 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4461 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4462 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4463 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004464
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004465Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004466-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004467
4468Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004469-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004470
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004471- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4472 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4473 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4474 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004475 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4476 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4477 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4478 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4479 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004480
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004481- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004482 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4483
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004484
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004485What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4486===========================
4487
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004488*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4489
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004490Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004491-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004492
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004493- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4494 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4495
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004496- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4497 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4498 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004499
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004500- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4501 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4502 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4503 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004504
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004505- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4506
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004507- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004508
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004509Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004510-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004511
4512- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004513 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004514 the module docstring for details.
4515
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004516Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004517-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004518
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004519- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004520 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4521 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4522 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004523
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004524- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4525 Nick Mathewson.
4526
4527Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004528----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004529
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004530- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4531 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4532 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4533 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4534 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4535 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4536 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4537 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4538
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004539- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4540 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4541 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4542 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4543
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004544- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4545 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4546 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4547 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4548 come a long way).
4549
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004550- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4551 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4552 write filters for these warnings).
4553
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004554- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4555 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4556 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4557 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4558 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4559
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004560- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4561 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4562 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4563 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4564 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4565 older distribution.
4566
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004567Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004568-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004569
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004570- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4571 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004572 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004573
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004574- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4575 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4576 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4577
4578- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4579
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004580- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4581
4582- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4583
4584- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4585
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004586- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004587
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004588- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4589
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004590New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004591-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004592
4593C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004594-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004595
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004596- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4597 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4598 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4599 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4600 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4601 against buffer overruns.
4602
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004603- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004604 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4605 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004606 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4607 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4608 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4609
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004610- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4611 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4612 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4613 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4614 deprecated.
4615
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004616Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004617-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004618
4619- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4620 relevant is found.
4621
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004622
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004623What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004624===========================
4625
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004626*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4627
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004628Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004629----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004630
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004631- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4632 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4633 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4634 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4635 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4636 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4637 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4638 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004639 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004640 repaired.
4641
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004642- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004643 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004644 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4645 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4646 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4647 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4648 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4649 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4650 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4651 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4652
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004653- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4654 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4655 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4656 leading BMO character).
4657
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004658- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4659 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4660 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4661
4662 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4663 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4664 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004665
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004666 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4667 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4668 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4669 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4670 for various simple to use conversions.
4671
4672 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4673 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4674
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004675 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4676 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4677 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4678 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4679 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4680 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4681 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4682 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4683 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4684 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4685 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4686 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4687 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4688 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4689 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004690
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004691- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4692 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4693 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004694 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004695 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004696
4697 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004698 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4699 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4700 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4701 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4702 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004703 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4704 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004705
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004706 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4707 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4708 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004709 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004710
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004711- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4712 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4713 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4714 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4715 floating arithmetic,
4716
4717 x = 9007199254740992.0
4718 print long(x)
4719
4720 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4721 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4722 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4723 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4724 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4725 functions are of good quality).
4726
4727 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4728 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4729 algorithms to break.
4730
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004731- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4732 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4733 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4734 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4735 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4736 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4737 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4738 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4739 order.
4740
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004741- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4742 operation along the most common code paths.
4743
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004744- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4745 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4746
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004747- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4748 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4749 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4750 {}.update(UserDict())
4751
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004752- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4753 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4754 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4755 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4756 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4757 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4758 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4759 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4760
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004761- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004762 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004763
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004764 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004765 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4766 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004767 join() method of strings
4768 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004769 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4770 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004771 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004772 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004773
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004774- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4775 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4776
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004777- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4778 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4779
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004780- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4781 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4782 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4783 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4784
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004785- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4786 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004787 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004788 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4789 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004790
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004791- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4792
4793
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004794Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004795-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004796
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004797- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004798 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004799 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4800 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4801
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004802- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4803 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4804
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004805- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4806 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4807 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4808 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4809
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004810- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4811 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4812 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4813
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004814- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4815
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004816- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4817
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004818- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4819 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4820 that are still imported into string.py).
4821
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004822- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4823
4824- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4825 Now it does.
4826
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004827- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4828
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004829- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4830 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4831 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4832 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4833 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004834 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4835 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004836
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004837- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4838 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4839 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4840 'help(object)'.
4841
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004842Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004843-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004844
4845- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004846 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004847 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4848 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4849
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004850- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004851 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4852 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004853
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004854C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004855-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004856
4857- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4858 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004859
4860----
4861
4862**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**