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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +000015- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
16 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
17
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +000018- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
19 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
20 Fixes bug #858016 .
21
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +000022- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
23 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
24 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
25
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +000026- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
27 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
28 improves their performance (about 35%).
29
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +000030- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
31 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
32 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
33
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +000034- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
35 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
36 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
37 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
38
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000039- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
40 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
41 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
42 length is not known).
43
44- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
45 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +000046 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
47 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000048 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
49
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +000050- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
51 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
52 keyword arguments.
53
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +000054- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
55 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
56 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
57
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +000058- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
59 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
60 cases.
61
62- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
63 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
64 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
65 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
66 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
67 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
68 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
69 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
70 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
71 a release build.
72
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +000073- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
74 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
75
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000076- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +000077 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000078
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +000079- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
80 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
81 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
82 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
83 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
84 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
85 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
86 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
87 destroyed.
88
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +000089- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
90 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
91 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
92 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
93 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
94 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
95 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
96 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
97
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +000098- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
99 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
100 character other than a space.
101
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000102- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
103 by the function object or by the method object, the function
104 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
105 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
106 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
107 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
108 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
109 attributes with the same name.
110
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000111- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
112 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
113 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
114 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
115 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
116 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
117 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
118 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
119 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
120 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
121 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
122 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
123 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
124 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000125
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000126- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
127 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
128 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
129 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
130 This has been repaired.
131
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000132- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
133
134- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
135
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000136- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
137 over a sequence.
138
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000139- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
140 from any iterable.
141
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000142- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
143
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000144- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
145 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
146 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
147 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
148 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
149 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
150 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
151 records with equal keys is unchanged).
152
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000153- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
154 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
155 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
156
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000157- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
158 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
159 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
160 freelist.
161
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000162- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
163 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
164
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000165- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
166 number.
167
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000168- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
169 a TypeError exception.
170
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000171- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
172 820195.
173
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000174- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
175 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
176 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
177
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000178- str and unicode builtin types now have rsplit() method that is
179 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
180 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000181
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000182- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
183 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
184 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
185
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000186- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
187 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
188 method is called as necessary.
189
190
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000191Extension modules
192-----------------
193
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000194- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
195 scheme has been updated the same as for list objects. The improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000196 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
197 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
198 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000199
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000200- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
201 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
202 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
203 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
204
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000205- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
206 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
207 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
208 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
209 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
210 #897625.
211
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000212- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
213 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
214
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000215- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
216 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
217 and pops on either side of the deque.
218
219- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
220 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
221
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000222- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
223 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
224 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
225 other functions that expect a function argument.
226
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000227- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
228
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000229- os.getsid was added.
230
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000231- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
232 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
233 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
234
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000235- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
236
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000237- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
238
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000239- readline.clear_history was added.
240
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000241- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
242
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000243- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
244
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000245- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
246
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000247- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
248
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000249- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
250
251- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
252
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000253- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
254
255- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
256
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000257- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
258 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
259 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
260
261- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
262 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
263 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
264 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
265 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
266 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
267 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
268
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000269- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
270 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
271 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
272 the Unix uniq filter.
273
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000274- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
275 iterators from a single iterable.
276
277- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
278 of raising a TypeError exception.
279
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000280- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
281 as parameter.
282
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000283Library
284-------
285
Brett Cannoncc454662004-03-20 21:31:33 +0000286- site.py now removes paths that do not exist.
287
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000288- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
289
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000290- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
291
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000292- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
293 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
294 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
295 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
296 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
297 accordingly.
298
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000299- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
300 decoding standards.
301
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000302- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
303 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
304 called for all requests.
305
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000306- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
307 they are passed to the compiler.
308
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000309- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
310 indent, width and depth.
311
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000312- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
313 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
314
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000315- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
316 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
317
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000318- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
319
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000320- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
321
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000322- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
323
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000324- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
325 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
326
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000327- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
328 for better performance
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000329
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000330- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
331 a string).
332
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000333- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
334
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000335- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
336
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000337- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
338
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000339- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
340
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000341- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
342 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
343 list of fieldnames.
344
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000345- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
346 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
347
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000348- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
349
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000350- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
351 empty lists.
352
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000353- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
354 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
355 and shelves.
356
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000357- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
358 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
359
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000360- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000361 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
362 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000363
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000364- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
365 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000366 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000367
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000368- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000369 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
370 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
371
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000372- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
373 and removed in Py2.4.
374
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000375- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
376
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000377- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
378
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000379Tools/Demos
380-----------
381
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000382- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
383 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
384
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000385- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
386
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000387- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
388 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
389 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
390 destination in situations where both files are given.
391
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000392- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
393 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
394 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
395 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
396
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000397- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
398
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000399- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
400 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
401 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
402 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
403 now.
404
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000405- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
406 in effect
407
408- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
409 C-c C-h
410
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000411- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
412 -d option was given.
413
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000414Build
415-----
416
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000417- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
418 removed.
419
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000420- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
421 supported (see PEP 11).
422
423- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
424
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000425- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
426
427- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
428 (see PEP 11).
429
430- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
431 sizeof(char) must be 1.
432
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000433C API
434-----
435
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000436- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
437 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
438
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000439- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
440 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
441 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
442 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
443 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
444
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000445- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
446 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
447 about 10% faster.
448
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000449- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
450 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
451
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000452- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
453 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
454 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
455 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
456
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000457New platforms
458-------------
459
460Tests
461-----
462
463Windows
464-------
465
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000466- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
467 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
468 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
469 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
470
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000471- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
472 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
473 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
474
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000475Mac
476----
477
478
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000479What's New in Python 2.3 final?
480===============================
481
482*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
483
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000484IDLE
485----
486
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000487- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
488 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
489 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
490 context-menu actions.
491
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000492- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
493 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
494 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
495 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
496 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
497 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
498 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
499 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
500 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
501
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000502
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000503What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
504=============================================
505
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000506*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000507
508Core and builtins
509-----------------
510
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000511- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000512 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000513 comment at the end are still unsupported.
514
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000515Extension modules
516-----------------
517
518- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
519 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
520 than once. This has been fixed.
521
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000522- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
523 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
524 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
525 call.
526
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000527- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
528
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000529Library
530-------
531
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000532- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
533 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
534
535- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
536 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
537 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
538 restored.
539
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000540IDLE
541----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000542
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000543- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000544
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000545Build
546-----
547
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000548- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
549 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
550
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000551C API
552-----
553
554Windows
555-------
556
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000557- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
558 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
559
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000560- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
561
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000562Mac
563---
564
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000565- Various fixes to pimp.
566
567- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
568
569- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
570 more problems than it solves.
571
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000572
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000573What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
574=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000575
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000576*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
577
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000578Core and builtins
579-----------------
580
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000581- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
582 by sys.setcheckinterval().
583
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000584- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
585 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000586 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000587
588- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
589 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
590 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000591 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000592
593- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
594 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000595
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000596- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
597 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
598 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
599
600- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000601 770247.
602
603- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000604
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000605Extension modules
606-----------------
607
608- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
609 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
610
611- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
612
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000613- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
614
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000615- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
616 contained within the _strptime module.
617
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000618- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
619 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
620
621- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000622 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
623
624- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
625 the find_class attribute, if present.
626
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000627- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000628
629 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
630 (SF bug 763298).
631
632 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000633 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
634 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
635 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000636
637 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
638
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000639Library
640-------
641
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000642- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
643
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000644- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
645 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
646 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
647 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
648 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
649 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
650 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
651 or Tester().
652
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000653- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
654 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
655 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
656 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
657 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
658 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
659 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
660 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
661 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000662
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000663 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000664
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000665- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
666 weren't before was an oversight.
667
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000668- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
669 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
670
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000671- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
672 when there are no lines.
673
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000674- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
675 which could occur with Tk 8.4
676
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000677- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
678 to child processes.
679
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000680- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
681
682- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
683
684- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
685 xmlrpclib.
686
687- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
688 responses.
689
690- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
691 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
692
693- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
694 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
695 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
696
697- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
698 used as patterns.
699
700- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
701 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
702 than Tk 8.3.
703
704- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
705
706- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000707
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000708Tools/Demos
709-----------
710
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000711- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
712
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000713- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
714
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000715- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000716
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000717Build
718-----
719
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000720- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
721
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000722- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
723
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000724- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
725 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000726
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000727- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
728 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
729 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000730
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000731C API
732-----
733
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000734- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
735 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
736
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000737Windows
738-------
739
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000740- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
741 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
742 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
743 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
744 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
745 Python exception ::
746
747 thread.error: can't start new thread
748
749 is raised now.
750
751- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
752 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
753 instead of from DLL teardown.
754
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000755Mac
756---
757
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000758- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000759 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000760 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
761 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
762 the executable in the bundle.
763
764- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000765
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000766- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
767
768- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
769 on Panther.
770
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000771What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
772================================
773
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000774*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000775
776Core and builtins
777-----------------
778
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000779- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
780 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
781 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
782 with the -i option.
783
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000784- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
785 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
786
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000787- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
788 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
789
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000790- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
791 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
792 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
793 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
794 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
795 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
796 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
797 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
798 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
799 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
800 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
801 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
802 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000803
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000804- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
805 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
806 embedded in a lambda expression.
807
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000808- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
809 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
810 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
811 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
812 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
813
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000814- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
815 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
816 matches the restriction on classic classes.
817
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000818- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
819 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
820
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000821- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
822 It's writable again.
823
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000824- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
825 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
826 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000827 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000828
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000829- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
830 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
831 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
832
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000833Extension modules
834-----------------
835
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000836- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
837 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
838
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000839- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
840 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
841 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
842 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
843
844- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
845 collection.
846
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000847- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
848 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
849 unique within a single program run.
850
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000851- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
852 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
853
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000854- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
855 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
856
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000857- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
858 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000859
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000860- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
861
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000862- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
863 Fixes SF bug #730685.
864
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000865- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
866 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
867 for many BSD-derived systems.
868
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000869
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000870Library
871-------
872
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000873- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
874 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
875 primary ones:
876
877 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
878 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
879 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
880
881 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
882 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
883 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
884 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
885 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
886 framework features (which doctest lacks).
887
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000888- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
889 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
890 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
891 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
892 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
893 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
894 argument.
895
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000896- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
897 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
898 in the archive.
899
900- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
901 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
902
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000903- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
904 569574).
905
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000906- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
907 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
908 no more.
909
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000910- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
911 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
912 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
913 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
914 code coverage.
915
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000916- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
917 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
918 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000919 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
920 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000921
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000922- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
923 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
924 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000925 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000926
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000927- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
928
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000929- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
930 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
931 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
932 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
933
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000934- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
935 handling.
936
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000937- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
938 __doc__ of data descriptors.
939
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000940- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
941 in socket.py.
942
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000943- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
944
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000945- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
946 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
947 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
948 opener with proxy support.
949
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000950- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
951
952- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
953
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000954Tools/Demos
955-----------
956
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000957- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
958
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000959- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
960
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000961- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
962 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000963
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000964- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
965 files.
966
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000967Build
968-----
969
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000970- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000971 different root directory.
972
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000973C API
974-----
975
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000976- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
977 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
978 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
979 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
980 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
981 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
982 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
983 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
984 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
985 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
986
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000987- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
988 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
989 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
990 from Python.
991
992
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000993New platforms
994-------------
995
996None this time.
997
998Tests
999-----
1000
1001- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1002 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1003
1004Windows
1005-------
1006
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001007- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1008
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001009- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1010 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1011 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1012 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1013 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1014 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1015 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1016 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1017 that's what it's for.
1018
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001019Mac
1020---
1021
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001022- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1023 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1024 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1025 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001026- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1027 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1028- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001029
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001030SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1031------------------------------------
1032
1033430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1034598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1035622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1036661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1037683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1038697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1039713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1040724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1041727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1042729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1043730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1044731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1045732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1046733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1047735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1048740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1049744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1050745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1051747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1052749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1053751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1054753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1055755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1056757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1057760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1058
1059
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001060What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1061================================
1062
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001063*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001064
1065Core and builtins
1066-----------------
1067
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001068- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1069 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1070
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001071- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1072 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1073 and cannot be strings).
1074
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001075- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1076 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1077 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1078 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1079
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001080- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1081 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1082 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1083 Python itself.
1084
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001085- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1086 the referenced object, if it has one.
1087
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001088- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1089 the thread started at
1090 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1091
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001092- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1093 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1094 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1095 placed on a list index.
1096
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001097- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1098 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1099 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1100 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1101
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001102- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1103 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1104 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1105 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1106 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1107 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1108 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1109
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001110- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1111 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1112 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1113 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1114 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1115
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001116- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1117 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001118
1119- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1120 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1121 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1122 #693195.)
1123
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001124- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1125 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001126
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001127- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001128 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001129 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1130 interpreter executions, would fail.
1131
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001132- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001133 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001134 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001135
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001136Extension modules
1137-----------------
1138
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001139- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1140 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1141 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1142 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1143
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001144- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1145 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1146
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001147- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1148 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1149 and Greg Chapman.)
1150
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001151- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1152 recursively.
1153
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001154- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001155 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1156 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1157 leaks.
1158
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001159- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1160
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001161- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1162 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1163 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1164 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1165 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1166 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1167 #705836.
1168
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001169- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001170 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1171
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001172- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1173 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1174 See SF bug #692416.
1175
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001176- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1177 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1178
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001179- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1180 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1181 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001182
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001183- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001184 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1185 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1186
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001187- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1188 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1189 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1190 timeouts to work properly.
1191
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001192Library
1193-------
1194
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001195- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1196 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1197 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1198 future release.
1199
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001200- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1201 for querying platform dependent features.
1202
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001203- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001204
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001205- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1206 pickle protocol versions.
1207
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001208- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1209 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1210 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1211
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001212- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1213
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001214- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1215 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1216 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1217 modules.
1218
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001219- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1220 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1221 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1222
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001223- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1224 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1225
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001226- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1227 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1228 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1229
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001230- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001231 MS Office extensions.
1232
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001233- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1234 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1235
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001236- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1237 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1238
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001239- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1240 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1241 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1242 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1243 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1244 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1245
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001246- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1247 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1248 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001249
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001250- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1251 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1252 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1253
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001254- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1255
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001256- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1257 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1258 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1259
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001260Tools/Demos
1261-----------
1262
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001263- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1264 See the module docstring for details.
1265
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001266Build
1267-----
1268
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001269- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1270 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001271
1272C API
1273-----
1274
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001275- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1276
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001277- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1278 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1279 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1280
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001281- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1282 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001283
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001284 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1285 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1286 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001287
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001288- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001289 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1290
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001291- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1292 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1293 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001294
1295New platforms
1296-------------
1297
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001298None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001299
1300Tests
1301-----
1302
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001303- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1304 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001305
1306Windows
1307-------
1308
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001309- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1310 function.
1311
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001312- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1313 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001314
1315Mac
1316---
1317
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001318- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1319 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001320
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001321- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1322 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001323
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001324- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1325 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1326 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001327
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001328- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001329 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1330 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001331
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001332- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1333 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001334
1335
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001336What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1337=================================
1338
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001339*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001340
1341Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001342-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001343
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001344- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1345 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1346 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1347
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001348- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1349 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1350 (SF patch #664376.)
1351
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001352- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1353 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1354 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1355 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1356 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1357 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001358 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001359
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001360- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1361 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1362 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1363 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001364 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001365
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001366- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1367 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1368 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1369 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1370 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1371 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1372 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1373 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1374 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1375 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1376 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1377
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001378- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1379 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1380 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1381 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1382 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1383 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1384
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001385- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1386 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1387
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001388- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1389 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1390 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1391 case.)
1392
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001393- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1394 passed as unicode strings.
1395
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001396- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1397 See SF bug #683467.
1398
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001399- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1400 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1401
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001402- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1403
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001404- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1405
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001406- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1407 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1408 arguments.
1409
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001410- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1411 See SF bug #667147.
1412
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001413- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001414 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001415 See SF bug #676155.
1416
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001417- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001418 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001419 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1420 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1421 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1422 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1423 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1424 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001425
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001426Extension modules
1427-----------------
1428
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001429- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1430 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1431 tp_as_number pointer.
1432
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001433- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1434 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1435 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1436 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1437 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1438
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001439- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1440
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001441- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1442
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001443- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001444 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001445 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1446 patch #678531.)
1447
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001448- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1449 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1450
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001451- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1452 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1453
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001454- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1455
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001456- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1457 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1458 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1459
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001460- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1461
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001462- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1463 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1464
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001465- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001466
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001467- datetime changes:
1468
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001469 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1470
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001471 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1472 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1473 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1474 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1475 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1476 now.
1477
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001478 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001479 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1480 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001481
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001482 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001483 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001484 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1485 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1486 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1487 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001488
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001489 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1490 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1491 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001492 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1493
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001494 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1495 by a later example coded by Guido.
1496
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001497 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001498 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1499 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1500 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001501 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1502 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1503
1504 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1505 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1506 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1507 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1508 tzinfo subclass instance.
1509
1510 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1511 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1512 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1513 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1514 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1515 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1516 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1517 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001518
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001519 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1520 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1521 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1522 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1523 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001524 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1525
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001526 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001527
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001528 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1529 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1530 as a naive datetime object.
1531
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001532 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1533 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1534 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1535
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001536 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1537 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1538 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1539 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1540 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1541 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1542 comparison.
1543
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001544 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1545 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1546 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1547 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001548 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001549
1550 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001551
1552 and ::
1553
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001554 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1555
1556 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1557 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1558 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1559 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1560
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001561 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1562 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1563 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1564 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1565 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1566
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001567 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1568 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001569 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1570 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001571
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001572Library
1573-------
1574
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001575- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1576 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1577
1578- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1579 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1580 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1581 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1582 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1583 See PEP 307 for details.
1584
1585- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1586 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1587
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001588- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1589 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001590 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001591 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1592 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001593 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001594
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001595- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1596 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1597
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001598- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1599 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1600 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1601
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001602- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1603
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001604- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1605 exception.
1606
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001607- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1608 class.
1609
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001610- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1611 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1612 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1613
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001614- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1615 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1616
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001617- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001618 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1619 See SF bug #659228.
1620
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001621- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1622 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1623 See SF patch #651082.
1624
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001625- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001626
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001627- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1628 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1629
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001630- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001631 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001632
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001633- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1634 DOS paths from other platforms.
1635
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001636Tools/Demos
1637-----------
1638
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001639- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1640 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1641 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1642 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1643 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1644 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1645 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1646 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1647 example:
1648
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001649 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1650 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001651
1652 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1653
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001654
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001655Build
1656-----
1657
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001658- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1659 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1660 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001661 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1662
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001663 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1664
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001665- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1666 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1667 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1668 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1669 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1670 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1671 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1672 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1673 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1674
1675- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1676 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1677 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1678 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1679
1680- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1681 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1682
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001683C API
1684-----
1685
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001686- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1687 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001688
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001689- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1690 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1691 tp_as_number pointer.
1692
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001693- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1694 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1695 (SF #681367)
1696
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001697- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1698 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1699 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1700 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001701
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001702Tests
1703-----
1704
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001705- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001706 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1707 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1708 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1709 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1710 pydoc.)
1711
1712- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1713
1714- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001715
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001716Windows
1717-------
1718
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001719- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1720 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1721 time).
1722
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001723- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1724 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1725
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001726- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1727 release without strong cryptography.
1728
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001729- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001730 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001731
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001732- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1733 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1734
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001735Mac
1736---
1737
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001738- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1739 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001740
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001741- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1742 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1743 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001744
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001745- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1746 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001747
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001748- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1749 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1750 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1751 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001752
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001753- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001754 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1755 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1756 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001757
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001758
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001759What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001760=================================
1761
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001762*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001763
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001764Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001765--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001766
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001767- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1768
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001769- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1770 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001771 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001772 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001773 a different meaning than before.
1774
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001775- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001776 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001777 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001778
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001779- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001780 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001781 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001782
1783- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1784 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1785 and deallocation.
1786
1787- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1788 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1789
1790- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1791 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1792 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1793 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1794 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1795
1796- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1797 now detected by the garbage collector.
1798
1799- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1800 [SF bug 519621]
1801
1802- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1803 identifier.
1804
1805- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1806 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1807 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1808 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1809 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1810 [SF bug 563060]
1811
1812- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1813 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1814 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1815 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1816 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1817
1818- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1819 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1820 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1821
1822- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1823
1824- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1825 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1826 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1827 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1828 state of the slots would be lost.)
1829
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001830Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001831-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001832
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001833- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001834 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1835 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1836 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1837 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001838 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1839 Jython 2.1.
1840
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001841- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001842 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001843 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1844 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1845 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1846 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1847 these, see PEP 302.
1848
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001849- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1850 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1851 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1852
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001853- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1854 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1855 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1856
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001857- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1858 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1859 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1860
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001861- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1862 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1863 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1864 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1865 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1866 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1867 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1868 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1869 releases or implementations.
1870
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001871- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001872 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1873 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001874
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001875- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1876 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1877
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001878- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1879 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1880 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1881
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001882- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1883 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1884
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001885- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1886 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001887 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1888 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001889
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001890- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1891 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1892 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1893 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1894 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1895
1896 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1897 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1898 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1899 pattern.
1900
1901 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1902 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1903 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1904 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1905
1906 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1907 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1908 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1909 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1910 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1911 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1912
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001913- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1914 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1915 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1916 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1917 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1918 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1919 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1920 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001921
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001922- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1923 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1924 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1925 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1926 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001927 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1928 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1929 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1930 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1931 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1932 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1933 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001934
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001935- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1936 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1937
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001938- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1939 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1940 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1941 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1942 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1943 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1944 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1945 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1946 to Zack Weinberg!
1947
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001948- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1949 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1950 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1951 type. This has been fixed now.
1952
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001953- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1954 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1955 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1956
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001957- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1958 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1959 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1960 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1961 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1962 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1963 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1964 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001965 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001966
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001967- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1968 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1969 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001970
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001971- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1972 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1973 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1974 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1975 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1976 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1977 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1978 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001979 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001980 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1981 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1982
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001983- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1984 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1985 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1986 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1987 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1988 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1989 this.)
1990
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001991- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1992 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001993 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001994 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001995 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1996 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001997 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1998 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001999
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002000- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2001 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2002 currently running.
2003
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002004- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2005 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2006 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2007 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2008
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002009- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2010 as directory names.
2011
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002012- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2013 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2014
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002015- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2016 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2017
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002018- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002019 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2020 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002021
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002022- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2023 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2024 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2025 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2026 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2027
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002028- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2029 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2030 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2031 removed.
2032
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002033- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2034 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2035 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2036
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002037- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2038 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2039 to __debug__.
2040
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002041- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2042 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2043 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2044
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002045- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2046 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2047 deprecated now.
2048
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002049- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2050 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2051 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002052
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002053- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2054 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2055 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2056 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2057 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002058
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002059- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2060 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2061
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002062- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2063 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2064 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002065 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002066 is backward compatible.
2067
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002068- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2069 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2070 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2071 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2072 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2073
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002074- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2075 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2076 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2077 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2078 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2079 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002080
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002081- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2082 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2083
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002084- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2085 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2086
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002087- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2088 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2089 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2090 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2091 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2092
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002093- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2094 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2095 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2096
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002097- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002098 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2099
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002100- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2101 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2102 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002103
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002104- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2105 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2106
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002107- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2108 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2109 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2110
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002111- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2112
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002113Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002114-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002115
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002116- Added three operators to the operator module:
2117 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2118 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2119 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2120
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002121- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2122
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002123- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2124 archives.
2125
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002126- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2127 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2128 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2129
2130 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2131
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002132- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2133 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2134 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002135 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002136
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002137- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2138 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2139 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2140 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002141 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2142 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2143 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2144 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002145
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002146- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2147 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002148
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002149- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2150
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002151- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2152 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2153
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002154- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2155 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2156 supported.
2157
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002158- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2159
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002160- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2161 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002162
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002163- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2164 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2165
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002166- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2167
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002168- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2169 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2170
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002171- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2172 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2173 functions but callable type objects.
2174
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002175- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002176 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002177 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002178
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002179- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2180 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002181
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002182- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2183 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002184
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002185- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2186 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2187 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2188 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2189
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002190- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2191 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002192
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002193- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2194 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2195 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2196 and __imul__.
2197
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002198- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002199 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2200 is called.
2201
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002202- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2203 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2204 interpreter was compiled.
2205
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002206- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2207 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2208 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002209 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002210 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2211 1, not 2.
2212
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002213- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2214 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2215 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2216 limit.
2217
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002218- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2219 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2220 bug #623464.
2221
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002222- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2223 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2224 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2225 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2226
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002227Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002228-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002229
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002230- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2231
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002232- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2233 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2234 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2235 with Python 2.3a2.
2236
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002237- os.path exposes getctime.
2238
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002239- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002240 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002241 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002242 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002243 unit tests of floating point results.
2244
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002245- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2246 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2247 has been increased.
2248
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002249- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2250 executed.
2251
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002252- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2253 postinstallation script.
2254
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002255- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2256 test the current module.
2257
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002258- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002259 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2260 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2261 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2262 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2263
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002264- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002265 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002266 Ward's Optik package.
2267
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002268- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2269 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2270 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2271 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2272
2273- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2274 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002275 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002276
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002277- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2278 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2279 shelf are binary pickles.
2280
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002281- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2282 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2283
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002284- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2285 modules are iterators now.
2286
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002287- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2288 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2289 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2290 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2291 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2292 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002293
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002294- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2295 with their entity value.
2296
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002297- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2298
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002299- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2300 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002301
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002302- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2303 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002304 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002305
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002306- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2307 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2308 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2309 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2310 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2311 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2312 main():
2313
2314 import locale
2315 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2316
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002317- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2318 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2319
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002320- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2321 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2322 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2323 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2324 to the new standard.
2325
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002326- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2327 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2328 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2329 an extension to the database.
2330
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002331- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2332 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2333 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2334 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002335 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002336
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002337- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002338 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002339
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002340- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2341 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2342 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2343 bounded integers.
2344
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002345- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2346 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2347 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2348 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2349 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2350 in existence.
2351
2352 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2353 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2354 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2355 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2356 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2357 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2358
2359 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2360 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2361 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2362 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2363
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002364- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2365 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2366 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2367
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002368- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2369
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002370- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2371 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2372 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2373 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2374
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002375- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2376 argument.
2377
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002378- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2379 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2380 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2381 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2382 [SF patch 560794].
2383
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002384- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2385 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2386 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002387 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2388 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2389 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002390
2391- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2392 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002393
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002394- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2395 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2396 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2397 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002398
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002399- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2400 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2401 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2402 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2403 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2404
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002405- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002406
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002407- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2408
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002409- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2410 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2411 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2412 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2413 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2414 identical to None.
2415
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002416- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2417 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2418 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2419 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2420 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2421 results now.
2422
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002423- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2424 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2425
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002426- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2427 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2428 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2429 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2430 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2431 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2432 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2433 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2434
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002435- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2436
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002437- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2438 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2439
2440- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2441 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2442 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2443 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2444 and other systems.
2445
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002446- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2447 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2448 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2449 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 +00002450 work well with these.
2451
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002452- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2453
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002454- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002455 connections.
2456
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002457- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2458 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2459 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2460
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002461- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2462 sets
2463
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002464- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2465 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2466 name.
2467
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002468- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2469 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2470 passed in.
2471
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002472- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002473 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002474 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2475 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002476
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002477- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2478
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002479- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2480
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002481- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2482 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2483 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2484
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002485- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2486 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2487 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2488 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002489 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002490
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002491- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002492 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002493 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002494
2495- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2496 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2497 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2498
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002499- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002500 the value of its expression argument.
2501
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002502- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2503 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2504 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2505
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002506- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2507 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2508 skipstone browser was included.
2509
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002510- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2511 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2512
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002513Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002514-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002515
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002516- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2517 names in addition to accepting file names.
2518
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002519- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2520 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2521 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2522 still used and useful.)
2523
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002524- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2525 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2526 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2527 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002528
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002529- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2530 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2531 the generated binary.
2532
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002533Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002534-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002535
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002536- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2537
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002538- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2539 except in the hands of experts.
2540
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002541- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002542 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2543 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2544 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002545
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002546- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2547 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2548 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2549 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2550 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2551 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2552 builds.
2553
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002554- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2555 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2556 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2557 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2558 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2559 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2560 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2561 new type.
2562
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002563- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002564
2565 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2566 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2567 positive infinities.
2568
2569 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2570 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2571 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2572 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2573 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2574 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2575 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2576
2577 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2578
2579 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2580
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002581- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2582 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2583 size of the executable.
2584
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002585- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2586 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2587 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2588 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002589
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002590- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2591
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002592- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2593 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2594 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002595
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002596- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2597 well as Unix.
2598
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002599- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2600 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2601 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2602 modules in the README file for details.
2603
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002604C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002605-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002606
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002607- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2608 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002609 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002610 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002611 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002612
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002613- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2614 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2615 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2616 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2617 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2618 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002619 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002620 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2621 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2622 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2623 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2624 aligned.)
2625
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002626- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2627 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2628 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2629
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002630- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2631 level.
2632
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002633- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2634 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2635 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2636 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2637 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2638
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002639- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2640 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2641 code.
2642
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002643- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2644 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2645 adjusting for negative indices.
2646
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002647- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2648 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2649 object.
2650
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002651- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2652 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2653 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2654
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002655- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2656 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002657
2658- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2659
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002660- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2661 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2662 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2663 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2664
2665- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2666
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002667- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002668
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002669- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002670 without going through the buffer API.
2671
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002672- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002673
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002674- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2675 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2676 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2677 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2678
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002679- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2680 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2681
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002682- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002683 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2684
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002685New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002686-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002687
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002688- OpenVMS is now supported.
2689
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002690- AtheOS is now supported.
2691
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002692- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2693
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002694- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2695
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002696Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002697-----
2698
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002699- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2700 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2701 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002702
2703Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002704-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002705
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002706- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2707 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2708 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2709 bugs.
2710 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002711 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002712 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2713 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002714 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002715
2716- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002717 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002718
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002719- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2720 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2721
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002722- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2723 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002724 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002725 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2726
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002727- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2728 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2729 use files" uninstall option).
2730
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002731- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2732
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002733- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2734 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2735
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002736- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2737 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2738 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2739
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002740- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2741 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2742 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2743 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2744 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002745 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2746 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2747 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002748
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002749- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002750 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002751 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2752 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2753 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2754 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2755 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2756 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2757 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2758 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2759 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2760 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2761 work around.
2762
2763- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2764 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2765 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2766 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2767 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2768 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2769 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2770 specified with O_CREAT too).
2771
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002772Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002773----
2774
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002775- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002776
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002777- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2778 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2779 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2780
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002781- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2782 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2783 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2784
2785- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2786 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2787 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2788 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2789 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2790 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2791 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2792 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002793
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002794- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2795 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2796 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002797
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002798- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2799 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2800 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2801 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2802 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002803
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002804- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2805 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2806 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002807
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002808- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2809 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002810
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002811- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2812 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2813 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2814 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2815 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002816
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002817- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2818 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2819 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2820
2821- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2822 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2823 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002824
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002825- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2826 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2827 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2828 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002829 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002830
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002831- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2832 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002833
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002834- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2835 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002836
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002837- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002838 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002839 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2840 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002841
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002842
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002843What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002844===============================
2845
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002846*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2847
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002848Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002849--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002850
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002851- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2852 with a custom metaclass.
2853
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002854Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002855-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002856
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002857- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2858 are proxies.
2859
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002860Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002861-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002862
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002863- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2864 very short strings.
2865
2866- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2867 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2868 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2869 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2870 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2871
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002872Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002873-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002874
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002875- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2876 close or delete time).
2877
2878- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2879 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2880
2881- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2882
2883- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002884 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002885
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002886Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002887-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002888
2889Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002890-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002891
2892C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002893-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002894
2895New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002896-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002897
2898Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002899-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002900
2901Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002902-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002903
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002904- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2905
2906- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2907 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2908
2909- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2910 deleted at process exit time.
2911
2912- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2913 in backslash.
2914
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002915Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002916----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002917
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002918- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2919 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2920 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2921
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002922
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002923What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002924===========================
2925
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002926*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2927
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002928Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002929--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002930
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002931- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2932 been extensively updated. See
2933
2934 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2935
2936 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2937
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002938- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2939 deleted!
2940
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002941- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2942 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2943 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2944 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2945 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2946
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002947- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2948
2949 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2950 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2951
2952 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2953 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2954 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2955 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2956 supported anyway.
2957
2958 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2959 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2960
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002961- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2962 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2963 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2964 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2965 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002966
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002967- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2968 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2969 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2970
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002971Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002972-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002973
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002974- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2975 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2976 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2977 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2978 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2979 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002980 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2981 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2982 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2983 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002984
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002985- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2986 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2987 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2988
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002989Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002990-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002991
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002992- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2993
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002994Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002995-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002996
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002997- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2998 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2999 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3000 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3001 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3002 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3003
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003004- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3005
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003006- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3007
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003008- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3009
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003010- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3011 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3012 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3013
3014- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3015
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003016Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003017-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003018
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003019- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3020 off a search on Google.
3021
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003022Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003023-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003024
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003025- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3026 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3027 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3028 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3029 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3030 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3031 other platforms should do likewise.
3032
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003033- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3034 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3035 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3036
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003037C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003038-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003039
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003040- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3041 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3042 producing key-value pairs.
3043
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003044- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003045 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003046 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3047 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3048 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3049 previously went unchallenged.
3050
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003051New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003052-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003053
3054Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003055-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003056
3057Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003058-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003059
3060Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003061----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003062
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003063- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3064 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003065
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003066- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3067 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3068 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3069 home.
3070
3071
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003072What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003073===========================
3074
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003075*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3076
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003077Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003078--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003079
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003080- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3081 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003082
3083 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003084 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003085
3086 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3087 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003088 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003089 This needs to be documented.
3090
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003091- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3092 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3093
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003094- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3095 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3096 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3097
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003098- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3099 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3100
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003101- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3102 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3103 class forbids it).
3104
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003105- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3106 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3107 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3108
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003109- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3110
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003111Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003112-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003113
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003114- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3115 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003116 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003117
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003118- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3119 (like 1 + '').
3120
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003121Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003122-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003123
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003124- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3125 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3126 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3127 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003128 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003129 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3130
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003131- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3132 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3133 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3134 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3135
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003136- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3137 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003138 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3139 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3140 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003141
3142- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3143 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003144
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003145- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3146 bytes on its input.
3147
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003148Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003149-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003150
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003151- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003152 convenience function.
3153
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003154- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3155 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3156 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003157 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3158 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3159 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3160 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3161 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3162 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003163
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003164- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3165 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3166 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3167 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3168
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003169- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3170 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3171 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3172
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003173- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3174 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3175 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3176 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3177
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003178- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3179 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003180 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003181 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3182 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3183 new -l and -e options.
3184
3185- statcache is now deprecated.
3186
3187- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3188 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003189 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003190 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3191 time properly taken into account.
3192
3193- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3194 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3195 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3196 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3197
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003198Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003199-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003200
3201Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003202-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003203
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003204- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3205 is built with libdb3 if available.
3206
3207- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3208
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003209C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003210-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003211
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003212- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3213 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3214 PySequence_Size().
3215
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003216- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3217
3218- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3219 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3220 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3221
3222- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3223 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3224
3225- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3226 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3227
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003228New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003229-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003230
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003231- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3232 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3233
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003234- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3235 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3236
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003237- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3238
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003239Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003240-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003241
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003242- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3243 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3244
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003245Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003246-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003247
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003248Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003249----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003250
3251- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3252 removed completely in the next release.
3253
3254- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3255 OSX.
3256
3257- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3258 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3259
3260- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3261
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003262
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003263What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003264===========================
3265
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003266*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3267
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003268Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003269--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003270
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003271- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003272 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003273 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003274 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3275 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003276 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3277 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003278 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3279 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003280
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003281- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3282 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3283
3284- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3285 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3286
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003287Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003288-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003289
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003290- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3291 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3292 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3293 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3294 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3295 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3296 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3297 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3298
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003299- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3300 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3301 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3302 example).
3303
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003304- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003305 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003306 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003307 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003308
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003309- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3310 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3311 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003312 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003313
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003314- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3315 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3316 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3317 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3318 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3319 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3320
3321 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3322
3323 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3324
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003325Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003326-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003327
3328- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3329
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003330- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3331
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003332- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3333 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003334
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003335- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3336 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3337 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3338 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3339 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3340 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003341 attributes.
3342
3343- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3344 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3345 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003346
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003347- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3348 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3349 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003350
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003351- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3352 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3353 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003354 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3355 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3356
3357- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3358 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003359
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003360Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003361-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003362
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003363- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3364 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3365
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003366- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3367 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3368 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3369 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3370
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003371- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3372 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3373 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3374 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3375
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003376 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3377 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3378 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3379 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3380 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3381 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3382 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3383 without losing information).
3384
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003385- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003386 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3387 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3388 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3389 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3390 module).
3391
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003392 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003393 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3394 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3395 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3396 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003397
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003398- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003399 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3400 encoding.
3401
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003402- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3403 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3404
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003405- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003406 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3407
3408- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3409 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3410 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3411 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3412
3413- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3414
3415- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3416 ON, and OFF.
3417
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003418- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3419 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3420
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003421Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003422-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003423
3424- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3425 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3426 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003427
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003428- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3429 been added: -X and -E.
3430
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003431Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003432-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003433
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003434- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3435 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3436
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003437C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003438-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003439
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003440- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3441 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3442 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3443 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3444 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3445
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003446- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3447 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3448 as long) arguments.
3449
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003450- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3451 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3452 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3453 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3454 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3455 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3456
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003457- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3458 input.
3459
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003460New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003461-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003462
3463Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003464-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003465
3466Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003467-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003468
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003469- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3470 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3471 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3472
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003473- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3474 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3475 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003476 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003477
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003478 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3479 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3480 import signal
3481 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003482
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003483 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003484 while 1:
3485 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003486 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003487 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3488 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3489 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3490 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003491
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003492
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003493What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3494===========================
3495
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003496*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3497
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003498Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003499--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003500
3501- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3502 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3503 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3504
3505- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3506 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3507 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3508 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3509 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3510 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3511 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003512
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003513- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003514 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003515 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3516 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3517 associate a docstring with a property.
3518
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003519- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3520 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3521 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3522 other built-in object types.
3523
3524- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3525 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3526 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3527 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3528 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3529
3530- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3531 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3532
3533- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3534 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003535 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003536 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3537 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3538 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3539 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3540 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3541
3542- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3543 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3544 class.
3545
3546- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3547 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3548 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3549 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3550
3551- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3552 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3553 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3554 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3555
3556- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3557 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3558
3559- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3560 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3561 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3562 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3563 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003564 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003565 with the same value as s.
3566
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003567- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3568
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003569Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003570----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003571
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003572- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3573
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003574- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3575 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3576 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3577 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3578 objects.
3579
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003580- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3581 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003582 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3583 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3584
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003585- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3586 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3587 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3588
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003589Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003590-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003591
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003592- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3593 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3594 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3595 by the instances.
3596
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003597- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3598 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3599 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3600
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003601- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3602 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3603 before the entire comparison is complete.
3604
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003605- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3606 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3607 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3608
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003609- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3610 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3611 getwriter().
3612
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003613- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3614 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3615
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003616- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003617 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3618 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3619
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003620- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3621 iterable object.
3622
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003623- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3624 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003625
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003626- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3627 authentication.
3628
3629- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3630 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003631
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003632- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003633 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3634 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3635 a sample driver.)
3636
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003637Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003638-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003639
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003640- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3641 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3642 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3643 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3644 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3645 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3646 kernel has large file support.
3647
3648- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3649 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3650 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3651 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3652 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3653
3654- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3655 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3656 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3657
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003658C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003659-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003660
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003661- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3662 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3663
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003664New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003665-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003666
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003667- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3668 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3669
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003670Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003671-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003672
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003673- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3674 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3675 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3676 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3677 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3678
3679- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3680 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3681 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3682 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3683
3684- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3685 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3686
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003687Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003688-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003689
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003690- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003691 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3692 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003693
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003694
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003695What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3696===========================
3697
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003698*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3699
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003700Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003701----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003702
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003703- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3704 big to represent as a C double.
3705
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003706- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3707 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3708 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3709 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3710 restriction).
3711
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003712- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3713 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3714 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3715 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3716 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3717
3718 >>> dir([])
3719 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3720 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3721 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3722 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3723 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3724 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3725 'reverse', 'sort']
3726
3727 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3728
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003729- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003730 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3731 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3732 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3733 OverflowError exception.
3734
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003735- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003736 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003737 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3738 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3739 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3740 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3741 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003742 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003743 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3744 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3745
3746 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3747 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3748 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3749 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003750
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003751- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003752 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3753 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3754 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3755 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3756 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3757 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3758 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3759 once it is created.
3760
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003761- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3762 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3763 (key, value) pairs.
3764
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003765- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003766 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3767 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3768
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003769- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3770 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3771 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3772 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3773 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003774
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003775- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003776 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3777 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3778
3779 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3780
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003781- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003782 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3783
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003784Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003785-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003786
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003787- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003788 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3789 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003790
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003791- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3792 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3793 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3794 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3795 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3796 in this area anymore).
3797
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003798- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3799 threading.Timer.
3800
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003801- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3802 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3803
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003804- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003805 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3806
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003807- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003808 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3809 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3810 converted to Python longs.
3811
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003812- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003813 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3814
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003815- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3816 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3817 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3818
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003819Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003820-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003821
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003822- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3823 division operators as per PEP 238.
3824
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003825Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003826-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003827
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003828- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3829 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3830 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3831 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3832
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003833C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003834-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003835
3836- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003837
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003838- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3839 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003840 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003841
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003842 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3843 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003844 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003845 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003846
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003847- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003848 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3849 module:
3850
3851 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003852
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003853 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3854 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003855
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003856 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3857 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003858
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003859 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3860
3861 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3862
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003863- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003864 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3865 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3866 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003867
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003868New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003869-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003870
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003871- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3872 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3873 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3874 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3875 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003876
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003877Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003878-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003879
3880Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003881-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003882
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003883- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3884 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3885 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3886 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003887 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3888 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3889 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3890 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3891 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003892
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003893- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003894 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3895
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003896
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003897What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3898===========================
3899
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003900*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3901
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003902Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003903-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003904
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003905- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3906 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3907
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003908- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3909 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3910 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003911
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003912- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3913 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3914 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3915 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003916
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003917- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3918
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003919- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003920
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003921Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003922-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003923
3924- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003925 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003926 the module docstring for details.
3927
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003928Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003929-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003930
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003931- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003932 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3933 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3934 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003935
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003936- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3937 Nick Mathewson.
3938
3939Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003940----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003941
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003942- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3943 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3944 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3945 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3946 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3947 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3948 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3949 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3950
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003951- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3952 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3953 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3954 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3955
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003956- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3957 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3958 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3959 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3960 come a long way).
3961
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003962- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3963 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3964 write filters for these warnings).
3965
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003966- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3967 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3968 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3969 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3970 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3971
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003972- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3973 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3974 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3975 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3976 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3977 older distribution.
3978
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003979Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003980-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003981
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003982- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3983 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003984 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003985
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003986- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3987 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3988 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3989
3990- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3991
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003992- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3993
3994- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3995
3996- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3997
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003998- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003999
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004000- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4001
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004002New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004003-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004004
4005C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004006-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004007
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004008- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4009 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4010 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4011 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4012 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4013 against buffer overruns.
4014
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004015- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004016 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4017 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004018 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4019 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4020 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4021
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004022- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4023 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4024 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4025 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4026 deprecated.
4027
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004028Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004029-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004030
4031- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4032 relevant is found.
4033
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004034
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004035What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004036===========================
4037
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004038*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4039
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004040Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004041----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004042
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004043- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4044 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4045 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4046 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4047 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4048 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4049 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4050 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004051 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004052 repaired.
4053
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004054- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004055 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004056 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4057 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4058 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4059 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4060 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4061 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4062 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4063 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4064
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004065- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4066 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4067 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4068 leading BMO character).
4069
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004070- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4071 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4072 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4073
4074 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4075 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4076 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004077
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004078 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4079 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4080 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4081 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4082 for various simple to use conversions.
4083
4084 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4085 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4086
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004087 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4088 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4089 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4090 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4091 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4092 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4093 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4094 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4095 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4096 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4097 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4098 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4099 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4100 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4101 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004102
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004103- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4104 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4105 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004106 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004107 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004108
4109 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004110 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4111 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4112 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4113 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4114 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004115 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4116 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004117
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004118 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4119 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4120 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004121 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004122
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004123- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4124 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4125 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4126 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4127 floating arithmetic,
4128
4129 x = 9007199254740992.0
4130 print long(x)
4131
4132 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4133 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4134 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4135 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4136 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4137 functions are of good quality).
4138
4139 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4140 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4141 algorithms to break.
4142
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004143- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4144 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4145 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4146 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4147 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4148 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4149 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4150 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4151 order.
4152
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004153- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4154 operation along the most common code paths.
4155
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004156- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4157 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4158
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004159- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4160 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4161 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4162 {}.update(UserDict())
4163
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004164- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4165 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4166 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4167 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4168 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4169 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4170 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4171 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4172
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004173- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004174 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004175
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004176 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004177 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4178 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004179 join() method of strings
4180 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004181 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4182 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004183 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004184 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004185
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004186- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4187 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4188
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004189- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4190 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4191
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004192- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4193 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4194 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4195 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4196
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004197- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4198 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004199 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004200 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4201 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004202
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004203- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4204
4205
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004206Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004207-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004208
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004209- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004210 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004211 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4212 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4213
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004214- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4215 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4216
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004217- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4218 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4219 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4220 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4221
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004222- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4223 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4224 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4225
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004226- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4227
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004228- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4229
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004230- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4231 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4232 that are still imported into string.py).
4233
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004234- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4235
4236- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4237 Now it does.
4238
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004239- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4240
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004241- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4242 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4243 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4244 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4245 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004246 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4247 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004248
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004249- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4250 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4251 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4252 'help(object)'.
4253
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004254Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004255-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004256
4257- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004258 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004259 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4260 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4261
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004262- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004263 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4264 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004265
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004266C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004267-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004268
4269- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4270 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004271
4272----
4273
4274**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**