What’s New In Python 3.0
Author: | Guido van Rossum |
Release: | 3.2.3 |
Date: | April 22, 2012 |
This article explains the new features in Python 3.0, compared to 2.6.
Python 3.0, also known as “Python 3000” or “Py3K”, is the first ever
intentionally backwards incompatible Python release. There are more
changes than in a typical release, and more that are important for all
Python users. Nevertheless, after digesting the changes, you’ll find
that Python really hasn’t changed all that much – by and large, we’re
mostly fixing well-known annoyances and warts, and removing a lot of
old cruft.
This article doesn’t attempt to provide a complete specification of
all new features, but instead tries to give a convenient overview.
For full details, you should refer to the documentation for Python
3.0, and/or the many PEPs referenced in the text. If you want to
understand the complete implementation and design rationale for a
particular feature, PEPs usually have more details than the regular
documentation; but note that PEPs usually are not kept up-to-date once
a feature has been fully implemented.
Due to time constraints this document is not as complete as it should
have been. As always for a new release, the Misc/NEWS file in the
source distribution contains a wealth of detailed information about
every small thing that was changed.
Common Stumbling Blocks
This section lists those few changes that are most likely to trip you
up if you’re used to Python 2.5.
Print Is A Function
The print statement has been replaced with a print()
function, with keyword arguments to replace most of the special syntax
of the old print statement (PEP 3105). Examples:
Old: print "The answer is", 2*2
New: print("The answer is", 2*2)
Old: print x, # Trailing comma suppresses newline
New: print(x, end=" ") # Appends a space instead of a newline
Old: print # Prints a newline
New: print() # You must call the function!
Old: print >>sys.stderr, "fatal error"
New: print("fatal error", file=sys.stderr)
Old: print (x, y) # prints repr((x, y))
New: print((x, y)) # Not the same as print(x, y)!
You can also customize the separator between items, e.g.:
print("There are <", 2**32, "> possibilities!", sep="")
which produces:
There are <4294967296> possibilities!
Note:
- The print() function doesn’t support the “softspace” feature of
the old print statement. For example, in Python 2.x,
print "A\n", "B" would write "A\nB\n"; but in Python 3.0,
print("A\n", "B") writes "A\n B\n".
- Initially, you’ll be finding yourself typing the old print x
a lot in interactive mode. Time to retrain your fingers to type
print(x) instead!
- When using the 2to3 source-to-source conversion tool, all
print statements are automatically converted to
print() function calls, so this is mostly a non-issue for
larger projects.
Views And Iterators Instead Of Lists
Some well-known APIs no longer return lists:
dict methods dict.keys(), dict.items() and
dict.values() return “views” instead of lists. For example,
this no longer works: k = d.keys(); k.sort(). Use k =
sorted(d) instead (this works in Python 2.5 too and is just
as efficient).
Also, the dict.iterkeys(), dict.iteritems() and
dict.itervalues() methods are no longer supported.
map() and filter() return iterators. If you really need
a list and the input sequences are all of equal length, a quick
fix is to wrap map() in list(), e.g. list(map(...)),
but a better fix is
often to use a list comprehension (especially when the original code
uses lambda), or rewriting the code so it doesn’t need a
list at all. Particularly tricky is map() invoked for the
side effects of the function; the correct transformation is to use a
regular for loop (since creating a list would just be
wasteful).
If the input sequences are not of equal length, map() will
stop at the termination of the shortest of the sequences. For full
compatibility with map from Python 2.x, also wrap the sequences in
itertools.zip_longest(), e.g. map(func, *sequences) becomes
list(map(func, itertools.zip_longest(*sequences))).
range() now behaves like xrange() used to behave, except
it works with values of arbitrary size. The latter no longer
exists.
zip() now returns an iterator.
Ordering Comparisons
Python 3.0 has simplified the rules for ordering comparisons:
- The ordering comparison operators (<, <=, >=, >)
raise a TypeError exception when the operands don’t have a
meaningful natural ordering. Thus, expressions like 1 < '', 0
> None or len <= len are no longer valid, and e.g. None <
None raises TypeError instead of returning
False. A corollary is that sorting a heterogeneous list
no longer makes sense – all the elements must be comparable to each
other. Note that this does not apply to the == and !=
operators: objects of different incomparable types always compare
unequal to each other.
- builtin.sorted() and list.sort() no longer accept the
cmp argument providing a comparison function. Use the key
argument instead. N.B. the key and reverse arguments are now
“keyword-only”.
- The cmp() function should be treated as gone, and the __cmp__()
special method is no longer supported. Use __lt__() for sorting,
__eq__() with __hash__(), and other rich comparisons as needed.
(If you really need the cmp() functionality, you could use the
expression (a > b) - (a < b) as the equivalent for cmp(a, b).)
Integers
- PEP 0237: Essentially, long renamed to int.
That is, there is only one built-in integral type, named
int; but it behaves mostly like the old long type.
- PEP 0238: An expression like 1/2 returns a float. Use
1//2 to get the truncating behavior. (The latter syntax has
existed for years, at least since Python 2.2.)
- The sys.maxint constant was removed, since there is no
longer a limit to the value of integers. However, sys.maxsize
can be used as an integer larger than any practical list or string
index. It conforms to the implementation’s “natural” integer size
and is typically the same as sys.maxint in previous releases
on the same platform (assuming the same build options).
- The repr() of a long integer doesn’t include the trailing L
anymore, so code that unconditionally strips that character will
chop off the last digit instead. (Use str() instead.)
- Octal literals are no longer of the form 0720; use 0o720
instead.
Text Vs. Data Instead Of Unicode Vs. 8-bit
Everything you thought you knew about binary data and Unicode has
changed.
- Python 3.0 uses the concepts of text and (binary) data instead
of Unicode strings and 8-bit strings. All text is Unicode; however
encoded Unicode is represented as binary data. The type used to
hold text is str, the type used to hold data is
bytes. The biggest difference with the 2.x situation is
that any attempt to mix text and data in Python 3.0 raises
TypeError, whereas if you were to mix Unicode and 8-bit
strings in Python 2.x, it would work if the 8-bit string happened to
contain only 7-bit (ASCII) bytes, but you would get
UnicodeDecodeError if it contained non-ASCII values. This
value-specific behavior has caused numerous sad faces over the
years.
- As a consequence of this change in philosophy, pretty much all code
that uses Unicode, encodings or binary data most likely has to
change. The change is for the better, as in the 2.x world there
were numerous bugs having to do with mixing encoded and unencoded
text. To be prepared in Python 2.x, start using unicode
for all unencoded text, and str for binary or encoded data
only. Then the 2to3 tool will do most of the work for you.
- You can no longer use u"..." literals for Unicode text.
However, you must use b"..." literals for binary data.
- As the str and bytes types cannot be mixed, you
must always explicitly convert between them. Use str.encode()
to go from str to bytes, and bytes.decode()
to go from bytes to str. You can also use
bytes(s, encoding=...) and str(b, encoding=...),
respectively.
- Like str, the bytes type is immutable. There is a
separate mutable type to hold buffered binary data,
bytearray. Nearly all APIs that accept bytes also
accept bytearray. The mutable API is based on
collections.MutableSequence.
- All backslashes in raw string literals are interpreted literally.
This means that '\U' and '\u' escapes in raw strings are not
treated specially. For example, r'\u20ac' is a string of 6
characters in Python 3.0, whereas in 2.6, ur'\u20ac' was the
single “euro” character. (Of course, this change only affects raw
string literals; the euro character is '\u20ac' in Python 3.0.)
- The built-in basestring abstract type was removed. Use
str instead. The str and bytes types
don’t have functionality enough in common to warrant a shared base
class. The 2to3 tool (see below) replaces every occurrence of
basestring with str.
- Files opened as text files (still the default mode for open())
always use an encoding to map between strings (in memory) and bytes
(on disk). Binary files (opened with a b in the mode argument)
always use bytes in memory. This means that if a file is opened
using an incorrect mode or encoding, I/O will likely fail loudly,
instead of silently producing incorrect data. It also means that
even Unix users will have to specify the correct mode (text or
binary) when opening a file. There is a platform-dependent default
encoding, which on Unixy platforms can be set with the LANG
environment variable (and sometimes also with some other
platform-specific locale-related environment variables). In many
cases, but not all, the system default is UTF-8; you should never
count on this default. Any application reading or writing more than
pure ASCII text should probably have a way to override the encoding.
There is no longer any need for using the encoding-aware streams
in the codecs module.
- The initial values of sys.stdin, sys.stdout and
sys.stderr are now unicode-only text files (i.e., they are
instances of io.TextIOBase). To read and write bytes data
with these streams, you need to use their io.TextIOBase.buffer
attribute.
- Filenames are passed to and returned from APIs as (Unicode) strings.
This can present platform-specific problems because on some
platforms filenames are arbitrary byte strings. (On the other hand,
on Windows filenames are natively stored as Unicode.) As a
work-around, most APIs (e.g. open() and many functions in the
os module) that take filenames accept bytes objects
as well as strings, and a few APIs have a way to ask for a
bytes return value. Thus, os.listdir() returns a
list of bytes instances if the argument is a bytes
instance, and os.getcwdb() returns the current working
directory as a bytes instance. Note that when
os.listdir() returns a list of strings, filenames that
cannot be decoded properly are omitted rather than raising
UnicodeError.
- Some system APIs like os.environ and sys.argv can
also present problems when the bytes made available by the system is
not interpretable using the default encoding. Setting the LANG
variable and rerunning the program is probably the best approach.
- PEP 3138: The repr() of a string no longer escapes
non-ASCII characters. It still escapes control characters and code
points with non-printable status in the Unicode standard, however.
- PEP 3120: The default source encoding is now UTF-8.
- PEP 3131: Non-ASCII letters are now allowed in identifiers.
(However, the standard library remains ASCII-only with the exception
of contributor names in comments.)
- The StringIO and cStringIO modules are gone. Instead,
import the io module and use io.StringIO or
io.BytesIO for text and data respectively.
- See also the Unicode HOWTO, which was updated for Python 3.0.
Overview Of Syntax Changes
This section gives a brief overview of every syntactic change in
Python 3.0.
New Syntax
PEP 3107: Function argument and return value annotations. This
provides a standardized way of annotating a function’s parameters
and return value. There are no semantics attached to such
annotations except that they can be introspected at runtime using
the __annotations__ attribute. The intent is to encourage
experimentation through metaclasses, decorators or frameworks.
PEP 3102: Keyword-only arguments. Named parameters occurring
after *args in the parameter list must be specified using
keyword syntax in the call. You can also use a bare * in the
parameter list to indicate that you don’t accept a variable-length
argument list, but you do have keyword-only arguments.
Keyword arguments are allowed after the list of base classes in a
class definition. This is used by the new convention for specifying
a metaclass (see next section), but can be used for other purposes
as well, as long as the metaclass supports it.
PEP 3104: nonlocal statement. Using nonlocal x
you can now assign directly to a variable in an outer (but
non-global) scope. nonlocal is a new reserved word.
PEP 3132: Extended Iterable Unpacking. You can now write things
like a, b, *rest = some_sequence. And even *rest, a =
stuff. The rest object is always a (possibly empty) list; the
right-hand side may be any iterable. Example:
This sets a to 0, b to 4, and rest to [1, 2, 3].
Dictionary comprehensions: {k: v for k, v in stuff} means the
same thing as dict(stuff) but is more flexible. (This is
PEP 0274 vindicated. :-)
Set literals, e.g. {1, 2}. Note that {} is an empty
dictionary; use set() for an empty set. Set comprehensions are
also supported; e.g., {x for x in stuff} means the same thing as
set(stuff) but is more flexible.
New octal literals, e.g. 0o720 (already in 2.6). The old octal
literals (0720) are gone.
New binary literals, e.g. 0b1010 (already in 2.6), and
there is a new corresponding built-in function, bin().
Bytes literals are introduced with a leading b or B, and
there is a new corresponding built-in function, bytes().
Changed Syntax
PEP 3109 and PEP 3134: new raise statement syntax:
raise [expr [from expr]]. See below.
as and with are now reserved words. (Since
2.6, actually.)
True, False, and None are reserved words. (2.6 partially enforced
the restrictions on None already.)
Change from except exc, var to
except exc as var. See PEP 3110.
PEP 3115: New Metaclass Syntax. Instead of:
class C:
__metaclass__ = M
...
you must now use:
class C(metaclass=M):
...
The module-global __metaclass__ variable is no longer
supported. (It was a crutch to make it easier to default to
new-style classes without deriving every class from
object.)
List comprehensions no longer support the syntactic form
[... for var in item1, item2, ...]. Use
[... for var in (item1, item2, ...)] instead.
Also note that list comprehensions have different semantics: they
are closer to syntactic sugar for a generator expression inside a
list() constructor, and in particular the loop control
variables are no longer leaked into the surrounding scope.
The ellipsis (...) can be used as an atomic expression
anywhere. (Previously it was only allowed in slices.) Also, it
must now be spelled as .... (Previously it could also be
spelled as . . ., by a mere accident of the grammar.)
Removed Syntax
- PEP 3113: Tuple parameter unpacking removed. You can no longer
write def foo(a, (b, c)): ....
Use def foo(a, b_c): b, c = b_c instead.
- Removed backticks (use repr() instead).
- Removed <> (use != instead).
- Removed keyword: exec() is no longer a keyword; it remains as
a function. (Fortunately the function syntax was also accepted in
2.x.) Also note that exec() no longer takes a stream argument;
instead of exec(f) you can use exec(f.read()).
- Integer literals no longer support a trailing l or L.
- String literals no longer support a leading u or U.
- The from module import * syntax is only
allowed at the module level, no longer inside functions.
- The only acceptable syntax for relative imports is from .[module]
import name. All import forms not starting with . are
interpreted as absolute imports. (PEP 0328)
- Classic classes are gone.
Changes Already Present In Python 2.6
Since many users presumably make the jump straight from Python 2.5 to
Python 3.0, this section reminds the reader of new features that were
originally designed for Python 3.0 but that were back-ported to Python
2.6. The corresponding sections in What’s New in Python 2.6 should be
consulted for longer descriptions.
- PEP 343: The ‘with’ statement. The with statement is now a standard
feature and no longer needs to be imported from the __future__.
Also check out Writing Context Managers and
The contextlib module.
- PEP 366: Explicit Relative Imports From a Main Module. This enhances the usefulness of the -m
option when the referenced module lives in a package.
- PEP 370: Per-user site-packages Directory.
- PEP 371: The multiprocessing Package.
- PEP 3101: Advanced String Formatting. Note: the 2.6 description mentions the
format() method for both 8-bit and Unicode strings. In 3.0,
only the str type (text strings with Unicode support)
supports this method; the bytes type does not. The plan is
to eventually make this the only API for string formatting, and to
start deprecating the % operator in Python 3.1.
- PEP 3105: print As a Function. This is now a standard feature and no longer needs
to be imported from __future__. More details were given above.
- PEP 3110: Exception-Handling Changes. The except exc as var
syntax is now standard and except exc, var is no
longer supported. (Of course, the as var part is still
optional.)
- PEP 3112: Byte Literals. The b"..." string literal notation (and its
variants like b'...', b"""...""", and br"...") now
produces a literal of type bytes.
- PEP 3116: New I/O Library. The io module is now the standard way of
doing file I/O. The built-in open() function is now an
alias for io.open() and has additional keyword arguments
encoding, errors, newline and closefd. Also note that an
invalid mode argument now raises ValueError, not
IOError. The binary file object underlying a text file
object can be accessed as f.buffer (but beware that the
text object maintains a buffer of itself in order to speed up
the encoding and decoding operations).
- PEP 3118: Revised Buffer Protocol. The old builtin buffer() is now really gone;
the new builtin memoryview() provides (mostly) similar
functionality.
- PEP 3119: Abstract Base Classes. The abc module and the ABCs defined in the
collections module plays a somewhat more prominent role in
the language now, and built-in collection types like dict
and list conform to the collections.MutableMapping
and collections.MutableSequence ABCs, respectively.
- PEP 3127: Integer Literal Support and Syntax. As mentioned above, the new octal literal
notation is the only one supported, and binary literals have been
added.
- PEP 3129: Class Decorators.
- PEP 3141: A Type Hierarchy for Numbers. The numbers module is another new use of
ABCs, defining Python’s “numeric tower”. Also note the new
fractions module which implements numbers.Rational.
Library Changes
Due to time constraints, this document does not exhaustively cover the
very extensive changes to the standard library. PEP 3108 is the
reference for the major changes to the library. Here’s a capsule
review:
Many old modules were removed. Some, like gopherlib (no
longer used) and md5 (replaced by hashlib), were
already deprecated by PEP 0004. Others were removed as a result
of the removal of support for various platforms such as Irix, BeOS
and Mac OS 9 (see PEP 0011). Some modules were also selected for
removal in Python 3.0 due to lack of use or because a better
replacement exists. See PEP 3108 for an exhaustive list.
The bsddb3 package was removed because its presence in the
core standard library has proved over time to be a particular burden
for the core developers due to testing instability and Berkeley DB’s
release schedule. However, the package is alive and well,
externally maintained at http://www.jcea.es/programacion/pybsddb.htm.
Some modules were renamed because their old name disobeyed
PEP 0008, or for various other reasons. Here’s the list:
Old Name
|
New Name
|
_winreg
|
winreg
|
ConfigParser
|
configparser
|
copy_reg
|
copyreg
|
Queue
|
queue
|
SocketServer
|
socketserver
|
markupbase
|
_markupbase
|
repr
|
reprlib
|
test.test_support
|
test.support
|
A common pattern in Python 2.x is to have one version of a module
implemented in pure Python, with an optional accelerated version
implemented as a C extension; for example, pickle and
cPickle. This places the burden of importing the accelerated
version and falling back on the pure Python version on each user of
these modules. In Python 3.0, the accelerated versions are
considered implementation details of the pure Python versions.
Users should always import the standard version, which attempts to
import the accelerated version and falls back to the pure Python
version. The pickle / cPickle pair received this
treatment. The profile module is on the list for 3.1. The
StringIO module has been turned into a class in the io
module.
Some related modules have been grouped into packages, and usually
the submodule names have been simplified. The resulting new
packages are:
- dbm (anydbm, dbhash, dbm,
dumbdbm, gdbm, whichdb).
- html (HTMLParser, htmlentitydefs).
- http (httplib, BaseHTTPServer,
CGIHTTPServer, SimpleHTTPServer, Cookie,
cookielib).
- tkinter (all Tkinter-related modules except
turtle). The target audience of turtle doesn’t
really care about tkinter. Also note that as of Python
2.6, the functionality of turtle has been greatly enhanced.
- urllib (urllib, urllib2, urlparse,
robotparse).
- xmlrpc (xmlrpclib, DocXMLRPCServer,
SimpleXMLRPCServer).
Some other changes to standard library modules, not covered by
PEP 3108:
- Killed sets. Use the built-in set() class.
- Cleanup of the sys module: removed sys.exitfunc(),
sys.exc_clear(), sys.exc_type, sys.exc_value,
sys.exc_traceback. (Note that sys.last_type
etc. remain.)
- Cleanup of the array.array type: the read() and
write() methods are gone; use fromfile() and
tofile() instead. Also, the 'c' typecode for array is
gone – use either 'b' for bytes or 'u' for Unicode
characters.
- Cleanup of the operator module: removed
sequenceIncludes() and isCallable().
- Cleanup of the thread module: acquire_lock() and
release_lock() are gone; use acquire() and
release() instead.
- Cleanup of the random module: removed the jumpahead() API.
- The new module is gone.
- The functions os.tmpnam(), os.tempnam() and
os.tmpfile() have been removed in favor of the tempfile
module.
- The tokenize module has been changed to work with bytes. The
main entry point is now tokenize.tokenize(), instead of
generate_tokens.
- string.letters and its friends (string.lowercase and
string.uppercase) are gone. Use
string.ascii_letters etc. instead. (The reason for the
removal is that string.letters and friends had
locale-specific behavior, which is a bad idea for such
attractively-named global “constants”.)
- Renamed module __builtin__ to builtins (removing the
underscores, adding an ‘s’). The __builtins__ variable
found in most global namespaces is unchanged. To modify a builtin,
you should use builtins, not __builtins__!
Changes To Exceptions
The APIs for raising and catching exception have been cleaned up and
new powerful features added:
PEP 0352: All exceptions must be derived (directly or indirectly)
from BaseException. This is the root of the exception
hierarchy. This is not new as a recommendation, but the
requirement to inherit from BaseException is new. (Python
2.6 still allowed classic classes to be raised, and placed no
restriction on what you can catch.) As a consequence, string
exceptions are finally truly and utterly dead.
Almost all exceptions should actually derive from Exception;
BaseException should only be used as a base class for
exceptions that should only be handled at the top level, such as
SystemExit or KeyboardInterrupt. The recommended
idiom for handling all exceptions except for this latter category is
to use except Exception.
StandardError was removed.
Exceptions no longer behave as sequences. Use the args
attribute instead.
PEP 3109: Raising exceptions. You must now use raise
Exception(args) instead of raise Exception, args.
Additionally, you can no longer explicitly specify a traceback;
instead, if you have to do this, you can assign directly to the
__traceback__ attribute (see below).
PEP 3110: Catching exceptions. You must now use
except SomeException as variable instead
of except SomeException, variable. Moreover, the
variable is explicitly deleted when the except block
is left.
PEP 3134: Exception chaining. There are two cases: implicit
chaining and explicit chaining. Implicit chaining happens when an
exception is raised in an except or finally
handler block. This usually happens due to a bug in the handler
block; we call this a secondary exception. In this case, the
original exception (that was being handled) is saved as the
__context__ attribute of the secondary exception.
Explicit chaining is invoked with this syntax:
raise SecondaryException() from primary_exception
(where primary_exception is any expression that produces an
exception object, probably an exception that was previously caught).
In this case, the primary exception is stored on the
__cause__ attribute of the secondary exception. The
traceback printed when an unhandled exception occurs walks the chain
of __cause__ and __context__ attributes and prints a
separate traceback for each component of the chain, with the primary
exception at the top. (Java users may recognize this behavior.)
PEP 3134: Exception objects now store their traceback as the
__traceback__ attribute. This means that an exception
object now contains all the information pertaining to an exception,
and there are fewer reasons to use sys.exc_info() (though the
latter is not removed).
A few exception messages are improved when Windows fails to load an
extension module. For example, error code 193 is now %1 is
not a valid Win32 application. Strings now deal with non-English
locales.
Miscellaneous Other Changes
Operators And Special Methods
- != now returns the opposite of ==, unless == returns
NotImplemented.
- The concept of “unbound methods” has been removed from the language.
When referencing a method as a class attribute, you now get a plain
function object.
- __getslice__(), __setslice__() and __delslice__()
were killed. The syntax a[i:j] now translates to
a.__getitem__(slice(i, j)) (or __setitem__() or
__delitem__(), when used as an assignment or deletion target,
respectively).
- PEP 3114: the standard next() method has been renamed to
__next__().
- The __oct__() and __hex__() special methods are removed
– oct() and hex() use __index__() now to convert
the argument to an integer.
- Removed support for __members__ and __methods__.
- The function attributes named func_X have been renamed to
use the __X__ form, freeing up these names in the function
attribute namespace for user-defined attributes. To wit,
func_closure, func_code, func_defaults,
func_dict, func_doc, func_globals,
func_name were renamed to __closure__,
__code__, __defaults__, __dict__,
__doc__, __globals__, __name__,
respectively.
- __nonzero__() is now __bool__().
Builtins
- PEP 3135: New super(). You can now invoke super()
without arguments and (assuming this is in a regular instance method
defined inside a class statement) the right class and
instance will automatically be chosen. With arguments, the behavior
of super() is unchanged.
- PEP 3111: raw_input() was renamed to input(). That
is, the new input() function reads a line from
sys.stdin and returns it with the trailing newline stripped.
It raises EOFError if the input is terminated prematurely.
To get the old behavior of input(), use eval(input()).
- A new built-in function next() was added to call the
__next__() method on an object.
- The round() function rounding strategy and return type have
changed. Exact halfway cases are now rounded to the nearest even
result instead of away from zero. (For example, round(2.5) now
returns 2 rather than 3.) round(x[, n])() now
delegates to x.__round__([n]) instead of always returning a
float. It generally returns an integer when called with a single
argument and a value of the same type as x when called with two
arguments.
- Moved intern() to sys.intern().
- Removed: apply(). Instead of apply(f, args) use
f(*args).
- Removed callable(). Instead of callable(f) you can use
isinstance(f, collections.Callable). The operator.isCallable()
function is also gone.
- Removed coerce(). This function no longer serves a purpose
now that classic classes are gone.
- Removed execfile(). Instead of execfile(fn) use
exec(open(fn).read()).
- Removed the file type. Use open(). There are now several
different kinds of streams that open can return in the io module.
- Removed reduce(). Use functools.reduce() if you really
need it; however, 99 percent of the time an explicit for
loop is more readable.
- Removed reload(). Use imp.reload().
- Removed. dict.has_key() – use the in operator
instead.
Build and C API Changes
Due to time constraints, here is a very incomplete list of changes
to the C API.
- Support for several platforms was dropped, including but not limited
to Mac OS 9, BeOS, RISCOS, Irix, and Tru64.
- PEP 3118: New Buffer API.
- PEP 3121: Extension Module Initialization & Finalization.
- PEP 3123: Making PyObject_HEAD conform to standard C.
- No more C API support for restricted execution.
- PyNumber_Coerce(), PyNumber_CoerceEx(),
PyMember_Get(), and PyMember_Set() C APIs are removed.
- New C API PyImport_ImportModuleNoBlock(), works like
PyImport_ImportModule() but won’t block on the import lock
(returning an error instead).
- Renamed the boolean conversion C-level slot and method:
nb_nonzero is now nb_bool.
- Removed METH_OLDARGS and WITH_CYCLE_GC from the C API.
Porting To Python 3.0
For porting existing Python 2.5 or 2.6 source code to Python 3.0, the
best strategy is the following:
- (Prerequisite:) Start with excellent test coverage.
- Port to Python 2.6. This should be no more work than the average
port from Python 2.x to Python 2.(x+1). Make sure all your tests
pass.
- (Still using 2.6:) Turn on the -3 command line switch.
This enables warnings about features that will be removed (or
change) in 3.0. Run your test suite again, and fix code that you
get warnings about until there are no warnings left, and all your
tests still pass.
- Run the 2to3 source-to-source translator over your source code
tree. (See 2to3 - Automated Python 2 to 3 code translation for more on this tool.) Run the
result of the translation under Python 3.0. Manually fix up any
remaining issues, fixing problems until all tests pass again.
It is not recommended to try to write source code that runs unchanged
under both Python 2.6 and 3.0; you’d have to use a very contorted
coding style, e.g. avoiding print statements, metaclasses,
and much more. If you are maintaining a library that needs to support
both Python 2.6 and Python 3.0, the best approach is to modify step 3
above by editing the 2.6 version of the source code and running the
2to3 translator again, rather than editing the 3.0 version of the
source code.
For porting C extensions to Python 3.0, please see Porting Extension Modules to Python 3.