+++++++++++ Python News +++++++++++ (editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.) What's new in Python 3.0b1? =========================== *Release date: XX-June-2008* Core and Builtins ----------------- - Issue #2630: implement PEP 3138. repr() now returns printable Unicode characters unescaped, to get an ASCII-only representation of an object use ascii(). - Issue #1342: On windows, Python could not start when installed in a directory with non-ascii characters. - Implement PEP 3121: new module initialization and finalization API. - Removed the already-defunct ``-t`` option. - Issue #2957: Corrected a ValueError "recursion limit exceeded", when unmarshalling many code objects, which happens when importing a large .pyc file (~1000 functions). - Issue #2963: fix merging oversight that disabled method cache for all types. - Issue #2964: fix a missing INCREF in instancemethod_descr_get. - Issue #2895: Don't crash when given bytes objects as keyword names. - Issue #2798: When parsing arguments with PyArg_ParseTuple, the "s" code now allows any unicode string and returns a utf-8 encoded buffer, just like the "s#" code already does. The "z" code was corrected as well. - Issue #2863: generators now have a ``gen.__name__`` attribute that equals ``gen.gi_code.co_name``, like ``func.__name___`` that equals ``func.func_code.co_name``. The repr() of a generator now also contains this name. - Issue #2831: enumerate() now has a ``start`` argument. - Issue #2801: fix bug in the float.is_integer method where a ValueError was sometimes incorrectly raised. - The ``--with-toolbox-glue`` option (and the associated pymactoolbox.h) have been removed. - Issue #2196: hasattr() now lets exceptions which do not inherit Exception (KeyboardInterrupt, and SystemExit) propagate instead of ignoring them. - #3021 Exception reraising sematics have been significantly improved. However, f_exc_type, f_exc_value, and f_exc_traceback cannot be accessed from Python code anymore. - Three of PyNumberMethods' members, nb_coerce, nb_hex, and nb_oct, have been removed. Extension Modules ----------------- - Renamed ``_winreg`` module to ``winreg``. - Support os.O_ASYNC and fcntl.FASYNC if the constants exist on the platform. - Support for Windows 9x has been removed from the winsound module. - Issue #2870: cmathmodule.c compile error. Library ------- - mimetools has been removed in favor of the email package. - Patch #2849: Remove use of rfc822 module from standard library. - Added C optimized implementation of io.StringIO. - Removed the ``htmllib`` and ``sgmllib`` modules. - The deprecated ``SmartCookie`` and ``SimpleCookie`` classes have been removed from ``http.cookies``. - The ``commands`` module has been removed. Its getoutput() and getstatusoutput() functions have been moved to the ``subprocess`` module. - The ``http`` package was created; it contains the old ``httplib`` as ``http.client``, ``Cookie`` as ``http.cookies``, ``cookielib`` as ``http.cookiejar``, and the content of the three ``HTTPServer`` modules as ``http.server``. - The ``xmlrpc`` package was created; it contains the old ``xmlrpclib`` module as ``xmlrpc.client`` and the content of the old ``SimpleXMLRPCServer`` and ``DocXMLRPCServer`` modules as ``xmlrpc.server``. - The ``dbm`` package was created, containing the old modules ``anydbm`` and ``whichdb`` in its ``__init__.py``, and having ``dbm.gnu`` (was ``gdbm``), ``dbm.bsd`` (was ``dbhash``), ``dbm.ndbm`` (was ``dbm``) and ``dbm.dumb`` (was ``dumbdbm``) as submodules. - The ``repr`` module has been renamed to ``reprlib``. - The ``statvfs`` module has been removed. - Issue #1713041: fix pprint's handling of maximum depth. - Issue #2250: Exceptions raised during evaluation of names in rlcompleter's ``Completer.complete()`` method are now caught and ignored. - Patch #2659: Added ``break_on_hyphens`` option to textwrap's ``TextWrapper`` class. - Issue #2487: change the semantics of math.ldexp(x, n) when n is too large to fit in a C long. ldexp(x, n) now returns a zero (with suitable sign) if n is large and negative; previously, it raised OverflowError. - The ``ConfigParser`` module has been renamed to ``configparser``. - Issue #2865: webbrowser.open() works again in a KDE environment. - The ``multifile`` module has been removed. - The ``SocketServer`` module has been renamed to ``socketserver``. - Fixed the ``__all__`` setting on ``collections`` to include ``UserList`` and ``UserString``. - The sre module has been removed. - The Queue module has been renamed to queue. - The copy_reg module has been renamed to copyreg. - The mhlib module has been removed. - The ihooks module has been removed. - The fpformat module has been removed. - The dircache module has been removed. - The Canvas module has been removed. - The Decimal module gained the magic methods __round__, __ceil__, __floor__ and __trunc__, to give support for round, math.ceil, math.floor and math.trunc. - The user module has been removed. - The mutex module has been removed. - The imputil module has been removed. - os.path.walk has been removed in favor of os.walk. - pdb gained the "until" command. - The test.test_support module has been renamed to test.support. - The threading module API's were renamed to by PEP 8 complaint. Tools/Demos ----------- - The bgen tool has been removed. Build ----- What's New in Python 3.0a5? =========================== *Release date: 08-May-2008* Core and Builtins ----------------- - Fixed misbehaviour of PyLong_FromSsize_t on systems where sizeof(size_t) > sizeof(long). - Issue #2221: Corrected a SystemError "error return without exception set", when the code executed by exec() raises an exception, and sys.stdout.flush() also raises an error. - Bug #2565: The repr() of type objects now calls them 'class', not 'type' - whether they are builtin types or not. - The command line processing was converted to pass Unicode strings through as unmodified as possible; as a consequence, the C API related to command line arguments was changed to use wchar_t. - All backslashes in raw strings are interpreted literally. This means that '\u' and '\U' escapes are not treated specially. Extension Modules ----------------- Library ------- - ctypes objects now support the PEP3118 buffer interface. - Issue #2682: ctypes callback functions now longer contain a cyclic reference to themselves. - Issue #2058: Remove the buf attribute and add __slots__ to the TarInfo class in order to reduce tarfile's memory usage. - Bug #2606: Avoid calling .sort() on a dict_keys object. - The bundled libffi copy is now in sync with the recently released libffi3.0.5 version, apart from some small changes to Modules/_ctypes/libffi/configure.ac. Build ----- - Issue #1496032: On alpha, use -mieee when gcc is the compiler. - "make install" is now an alias for "make altinstall", to prevent accidentally overwriting a Python 2.x installation. Use "make fullinstall" to force Python 3.0 to be installed as "python". - Issue #2544: On HP-UX systems, use 'gcc -shared' for linking when gcc is used as compiler. What's New in Python 3.0a4? =========================== *Release date: 02-Apr-2008* Core and Builtins ----------------- - Bug #2301: Don't try decoding the source code into the original encoding for syntax errors. Extension Modules ----------------- - The dl module was removed, use the ctypes module instead. - Use wchar_t functions in _locale module. Library ------- - The class distutils.commands.build_py.build_py_2to3 can be used as a build_py replacement to automatically run 2to3 on modules that are going to be installed. - A new pickle protocol (protocol 3) is added with explicit support for bytes. This is the default protocol. It intentionally cannot be unpickled by Python 2.x. - When a pickle written by Python 2.x contains an (8-bit) str instance, this is now decoded to a (Unicode) str instance. The encoding used to do this defaults to ASCII, but can be overridden via two new keyword arguments to the Unpickler class. Previously this would create bytes instances, which is usually wrong: str instances are often used to pickle attribute names etc., and text is more common than binary data anyway. - Default to ASCII as the locale.getpreferredencoding, if the POSIX system doesn't support CODESET and LANG isn't set or doesn't allow deduction of an encoding. - Issue #1202: zlib.crc32 and zlib.adler32 now return an unsigned value. - Issue #719888: Updated tokenize to use a bytes API. generate_tokens has been renamed tokenize and now works with bytes rather than strings. A new detect_encoding function has been added for determining source file encoding according to PEP-0263. Token sequences returned by tokenize always start with an ENCODING token which specifies the encoding used to decode the file. This token is used to encode the output of untokenize back to bytes. What's New in Python 3.0a3? =========================== *Release date: 29-Feb-2008* Core and Builtins ----------------- - Issue #2282: io.TextIOWrapper was not overriding seekable() from io.IOBase. - Issue #2115: Important speedup in setting __slot__ attributes. Also prevent a possible crash: an Abstract Base Class would try to access a slot on a registered virtual subclass. - Fixed repr() and str() of complex numbers with infinity or nan as real or imaginary part. - Clear all free list during a gc.collect() of the highest generation in order to allow pymalloc to free more arenas. Python may give back memory to the OS earlier. - Issue #2045: Fix an infinite recursion triggered when printing a subclass of collections.defaultdict, if its default_factory is set to a bound method. - Fixed a minor memory leak in dictobject.c. The content of the free list was not freed on interpreter shutdown. - Limit free list of method and builtin function objects to 256 entries each. - Patch #1953: Added ``sys._compact_freelists()`` and the C API functions ``PyInt_CompactFreeList`` and ``PyFloat_CompactFreeList`` to compact the internal free lists of pre-allocted ints and floats. - Bug #1983: Fixed return type of fork(), fork1() and forkpty() calls. Python expected the return type int but the fork familie returns pi_t. - Issue #1678380: Fix a bug that identifies 0j and -0j when they appear in the same code unit. - Issue #2025: Added tuple.count() and tuple.index() methods to comply with the collections.Sequence API. - Fixed multiple reinitialization of the Python interpreter. The small int list in longobject.c has caused a seg fault during the third finalization. - Issue #1973: bytes.fromhex('') raised SystemError. - Issue #1771: remove cmp parameter from sorted() and list.sort(). - Issue #1969: split and rsplit in bytearray are inconsistent. - map() no longer accepts None for the first argument. Use zip() instead. - Issue #1769: Now int("- 1") is not allowed any more. - Object/longobject.c: long(float('nan')) raises an OverflowError instead of returning 0. - Issue #1762972: __file__ points to the source file instead of the pyc/pyo file if the py file exists. - Issue #1393: object_richcompare() returns NotImplemented instead of False if the objects aren't equal, to give the other side a chance. - Issue #1692: Interpreter was not displaying location of SyntaxError. - Improve some exception messages when Windows fails to load an extension module. Now we get for example '%1 is not a valid Win32 application' instead of 'error code 193'. Also use Unicode strings to deal with non-English locales. - Issue #1587: Added instancemethod wrapper for PyCFunctions. The Python C API has gained a new type *PyInstanceMethod_Type* and the functions *PyInstanceMethod_Check(o)*, *PyInstanceMethod_New(func)* and *PyInstanceMethod_Function(im)*. - Constants gc.DEBUG_OBJECT and gc.DEBUG_INSTANCE have been removed from the gc module; gc.DEBUG_COLLECTABLE or gc.DEBUG_UNCOLLECTABLE are now enough to print the corresponding list of objects considered by the garbage collector. - Issue #1573: Improper use of the keyword-only syntax makes the parser crash. - Issue #1564: The set implementation should special-case PyUnicode instead of PyString. - Patch #1031213: Decode source line in SyntaxErrors back to its original source encoding. - inspect.getsource() includes the decorators again. - Bug #1713: posixpath.ismount() claims symlink to a mountpoint is a mountpoint. - Fix utf-8-sig incremental decoder, which didn't recognise a BOM when the first chunk fed to the decoder started with a BOM, but was longer than 3 bytes. Extension Modules ----------------- - Code for itertools ifilter(), imap(), and izip() moved to bultins and renamed to filter(), map(), and zip(). Also, renamed izip_longest() to zip_longest() and ifilterfalse() to filterfalse(). - Issue #1762972: Readded the reload() function as imp.reload(). - Bug #2111: mmap segfaults when trying to write a block opened with PROT_READ. - Issue #2063: correct order of utime and stime in os.times() result on Windows. Library ------- - Weakref dictionaries now inherit from MutableMapping. - Created new UserDict class in collections module. This one inherits from and complies with the MutableMapping ABC. Also, moved UserString and UserList to the collections module. The MutableUserString class was removed. - Removed UserDict.DictMixin. Replaced all its uses with collections.MutableMapping. - Issue #1703: getpass() should flush after writing prompt. - Issue #1585: IDLE uses non-existent xrange() function. - Issue #1578: Problems in win_getpass. Build ----- - Renamed --enable-unicode configure flag to --with-wide-unicode, since Unicode strings can't be disabled anymore. C API ----- - Issue #1629: Renamed Py_Size, Py_Type and Py_Refcnt to Py_SIZE, Py_TYPE and Py_REFCNT. - New API PyImport_ImportModuleNoBlock(), works like PyImport_ImportModule() but won't block on the import lock (returning an error instead). What's New in Python 3.0a2? =========================== *Release date: 07-Dec-2007* (Note: this list is incomplete.) Core and Builtins ----------------- - str8 now has the same construction signature as bytes. - Comparisons between str and str8 now return False/True for ==/!=. sqlite3 returns str8 when recreating on object from it's __conform__ value. The struct module returns str8 for all string-related formats. This was true before this change, but becomes more apparent thanks to string comparisons always being False. - Replaced `PyFile_FromFile()` with `PyFile_FromFd(fd, name. mode, buffer, encoding, newline)`. - Fixed `imp.find_module()` to obey the -*- coding: -*- header. - Changed `__file__` and `co_filename` to unicode. The path names are decoded with `Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding` and a new API method `PyUnicode_DecodeFSDefault(char*)` was added. - io.open() and _fileio.FileIO have grown a new argument closefd. A false value disables the closing of the file descriptor. - Added a new option -b to issues warnings (-bb for errors) about certain operations between bytes/buffer and str like str(b'') and comparison. - The standards streams sys.stdin, stdout and stderr may be None when the when the C runtime library returns an invalid file descriptor for the streams (fileno(stdin) < 0). For now this happens only for Windows GUI apps and scripts started with `pythonw.exe`. - Added PCbuild9 directory for VS 2008. - Renamed structmember.h WRITE_RESTRICTED to PY_WRITE_RESTRICTED to work around a name clash with VS 2008 on Windows. - Unbound methods are gone for good. ClassObject.method returns an ordinary function object, instance.method still returns a bound method object. The API of bound methods is cleaned up, too. The im_class attribute is removed and im_func + im_self are renamed to __func__ and __self__. The factory PyMethod_New takes only func and instance as argument. - intobject.h is no longer included by Python.h. The remains were moved to longobject.h. It still exists to define several aliases from PyInt_ to PyLong_ functions. - Removed sys.maxint, use sys.maxsize instead. Extension Modules ----------------- - The `hotshot` profiler has been removed; use `cProfile` instead. Library ------- - When loading an external file using testfile(), the passed-in encoding argument was being ignored if __loader__ is defined and forcing the source to be UTF-8. - The methods `os.tmpnam()`, `os.tempnam()` and `os.tmpfile()` have been removed in favor of the tempfile module. - Removed the 'new' module. - Removed all types from the 'types' module that are easily accessable through builtins. What's New in Python 3.0a1? ========================== *Release date: 31-Aug-2007* Core and Builtins ----------------- - PEP 3131: Support non-ASCII identifiers. - PEP 3120: Change default encoding to UTF-8. - PEP 3123: Use proper C inheritance for PyObject. - Removed the __oct__ and __hex__ special methods and added a bin() builtin function. - PEP 3127: octal literals now start with "0o". Old-style octal literals are invalid. There are binary literals with a prefix of "0b". This also affects int(x, 0). - None, True, False are now keywords. - PEP 3119: isinstance() and issubclass() can be overridden. - Remove BaseException.message. - Remove tuple parameter unpacking (PEP 3113). - Remove the f_restricted attribute from frames. This naturally leads to the removal of PyEval_GetRestricted() and PyFrame_IsRestricted(). - PEP 3132 was accepted. That means that you can do ``a, *b = range(5)`` to assign 0 to a and [1, 2, 3, 4] to b. - range() now returns an iterator rather than a list. Floats are not allowed. xrange() is no longer defined. - Patch #1660500: hide iteration variable in list comps, add set comps and use common code to handle compilation of iterative expressions. - By default, != returns the opposite of ==, unless the latter returns NotImplemented. - Patch #1680961: sys.exitfunc has been removed and replaced with a private C-level API. - PEP 3115: new metaclasses: the metaclass is now specified as a keyword arg in the class statement, which can now use the full syntax of a parameter list. Also, the metaclass can implement a __prepare__ function which will be called to create the dictionary for the new class namespace. - The long-deprecated argument "pend" of PyFloat_FromString() has been removed. - The dir() function has been extended to call the __dir__() method on its argument, if it exists. If not, it will work like before. This allows customizing the output of dir() in the presence of a __getattr__(). - Removed support for __members__ and __methods__. - Removed indexing/slicing on BaseException. - input() became raw_input(): the name input() now implements the functionality formerly known as raw_input(); the name raw_input() is no longer defined. - Classes listed in an 'except' clause must inherit from BaseException. - PEP 3106: dict.iterkeys(), .iteritems(), .itervalues() are now gone; and .keys(), .items(), .values() return dict views, which behave like sets. - PEP 3105: print is now a function. Also (not in the PEP) the 'softspace' attribute of files is now gone (since print() doesn't use it). A side effect of this change is that you can get incomplete output lines in interactive sessions: >>> print(42, end="") 42>>> We may be able to fix this after the I/O library rewrite. - PEP 3102: keyword-only arguments. - Int/Long unification is complete. The 'long' built-in type and literals with trailing 'L' or 'l' have been removed. Performance may be sub-optimal (haven't really benchmarked). - 'except E, V' must now be spelled as 'except E as V' and deletes V at the end of the except clause; V must be a simple name. - Added function annotations per PEP 3107. - Added nonlocal declaration from PEP 3104: >>> def f(x): ... def inc(): ... nonlocal x ... x += 1 ... return x ... return inc ... >>> inc = f(0) >>> inc() 1 >>> inc() 2 - Moved intern() to sys.intern(). - exec is now a function. - Renamed nb_nonzero to nb_bool and __nonzero__ to __bool__. - Classic classes are a thing of the past. All classes are new style. - Exceptions *must* derive from BaseException. - Integer division always returns a float. The -Q option is no more. All the following are gone: * PyNumber_Divide and PyNumber_InPlaceDivide * __div__, __rdiv__, and __idiv__ * nb_divide, nb_inplace_divide * operator.div, operator.idiv, operator.__div__, operator.__idiv__ (Only __truediv__ and __floordiv__ remain, not sure how to handle them if we want to re-use __div__ and friends. If we do, it will make it harder to write code for both 2.x and 3.x.) - 'as' and 'with' are keywords. - Absolute import is the default behavior for 'import foo' etc. - Removed support for syntax: backticks (ie, `x`), <>. - Removed these Python builtins: apply(), callable(), coerce(), execfile(), file(), reduce(), reload(). - Removed these Python methods: {}.has_key. - Removed these opcodes: BINARY_DIVIDE, INPLACE_DIVIDE, UNARY_CONVERT. - Remove C API support for restricted execution. - zip(), map() and filter() now return iterators, behaving like their itertools counterparts. This also affect map()'s behavior on sequences of unequal length -- it now stops after the shortest one is exhausted. - Additions: set literals, set comprehensions, ellipsis literal. - Added class decorators per PEP 3129. Extension Modules ----------------- - Removed the imageop module. Obsolete long with its unit tests becoming useless from the removal of rgbimg and imgfile. - Removed these attributes from the operator module: div, idiv, __div__, __idiv__, isCallable, sequenceIncludes. - Removed these attributes from the sys module: exc_clear(), exc_type, exc_value, exc_traceback. Library ------- - Removed the compiler package. Use of the _ast module and (an eventual) AST -> bytecode mechanism. - Removed these modules: audiodev, Bastion, bsddb185, exceptions, linuxaudiodev, md5, MimeWriter, mimify, popen2, rexec, sets, sha, stringold, strop, sunaudiodev, timing, xmllib. - Moved the toaiff module to Tools/Demos. - Removed obsolete IRIX modules: al/AL, cd/CD, cddb, cdplayer, cl/CL, DEVICE, ERRNO, FILE, fl/FL, flp, fm, GET, gl/GL, GLWS, IN, imgfile, IOCTL, jpeg, panel, panelparser, readcd, sgi, sv/SV, torgb, WAIT. - Removed obsolete functions: commands.getstatus(), os.popen*(). - Removed functions in the string module that are also string methods; Remove string.{letters, lowercase, uppercase}. - Removed support for long obsolete platforms: plat-aix3, plat-irix5. - Removed xmlrpclib.SlowParser. It was based on xmllib. - Patch #1680961: atexit has been reimplemented in C. - Add new codecs for UTF-32, UTF-32-LE and UTF-32-BE. Build ----- C API ----- - Removed these Python slots: __coerce__, __div__, __idiv__, __rdiv__. - Removed these C APIs: PyNumber_Coerce(), PyNumber_CoerceEx(), PyMember_Get, PyMember_Set. - Removed these C slots/fields: nb_divide, nb_inplace_divide. - Removed these macros: staticforward, statichere, PyArg_GetInt, PyArg_NoArgs, _PyObject_Del. - Removed these typedefs: intargfunc, intintargfunc, intobjargproc, intintobjargproc, getreadbufferproc, getwritebufferproc, getsegcountproc, getcharbufferproc, memberlist. Tests ----- - Removed test.testall as test.regrtest replaces it. Documentation ------------- Mac --- - The cfmfile module was removed. Platforms --------- - Support for BeOS and AtheOS was removed (according to PEP 11). - Support for RiscOS, Irix, Tru64 was removed (alledgedly). Tools/Demos ----------- **(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**