PYTHON

Python is a general-purpose, high-level programming language. Its design philosophy emphasizes programmer productivity and code readability.'s core syntax and semantics are minimalistic, while the standard library is large and comprehensive. Its use of whitespace as block delimiters is unusual among popular programming languages.

Python supports multiple programming paradigms (primarily object oriented, imperative, and functional) and features a fully dynamic type system and automatic memory management, similar to Perl, Ruby, Scheme, and Tcl. Like other dynamic languages, Python is often used as a scripting language.

Python was first released by Guido van Rossum in 1991. The language has an open, community-based development model managed by the non-profit Python Software Foundation, which also maintains the de facto standard definition of the language in CPython, the reference implementation.

Version 1.0

Python reached version 1.0 in January 1994. The major new features included in this release were the functional programming tools lambda, map, filter and reduce. Van Rossum stated that “Python acquired lambda, reduce(), filter() and map(), courtesy of (I believe) a Lisp hacker who missed them and submitted working patches.”

The last version released while van Rossum was at CWI was Python 1.2. In 1995, van Rossum continued his work on Python at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) in Reston, Virginia from where he released several versions.

By version 1.4, Python had acquired several new features. Notable among these are the Modula-3 inspired keyword arguments (which are also similar to Common Lisp's keyword arguments), and built-in support for complex numbers. Also included is a basic form of data hiding by name mangling, though this is easily bypassed.

During van Rossum's stay at CNRI, he launched the Computer Programming for Everybody (CP4E) initiative, intending to make programming more accessible to more people, with a basic 'literacy' in programming languages, similar to the basic English literacy and mathematics skills required by most employers. Python served a central role in this: because of its focus on clean syntax, it was already suitable, and CP4E's goals bore similarities to its predecessor, ABC. The project was funded by DARPA.As of 2007^[update], the CP4E project is inactive, and while Python attempts to be easily learnable and not too arcane in its syntax and semantics, reaching out to non-programmers is not an active concern.

BeOpen

In 2000, the Python core development team moved to BeOpen.com to form the BeOpen PythonLabs team. CNRI requested that a version 1.6 be released, summarizing Python's development up to the point at which the development team left CNRI. Consequently, the release schedules for 1.6 and 2.0 had a significant amount of overlap.^[11] Python 2.0 was the first and only release from BeOpen.com. After Python 2.0 was released by BeOpen.com, Guido van Rossum and the other PythonLabs developers joined Digital Creations.

The Python 1.6 release included a new CNRI license that was substantially longer than the CWI license that had been used for earlier releases. The new license included a clause stating that the license was governed by the laws of the State of Virginia. The Free Software Foundation argued that the choice-of-law clause was incompatible with the GNU GPL. BeOpen, CNRI, and the FSF negotiated a change to Python's free software license that would make it GPL-compatible. Python 1.6.1 is essentially the same as Python 1.6, with a few minor bug fixes, and with the new GPL-compatible license.

Version 2.0

Python 2.0 introduced list comprehensions, a feature borrowed from the functional programming languages SETL and Haskell. Python's syntax for this construct is very similar to Haskell's, apart from Haskell's preference for punctuation characters and Python's preference for alphabetic keywords. Python 2.0 also introduced a garbage collection system capable of collecting reference cycles.

Python 2.1 was close to Python 1.6.1, as well as Python 2.0. Its license was renamed Python Software Foundation License. All code, documentation and specifications added, from the time of Python 2.1's alpha release on, is owned by the Python Software Foundation (PSF), a non-profit organization formed in 2001, modeled after the Apache Software Foundation. The release included a change to the language specification to support nested scopes, like other statically scoped languages.(The feature was turned off by default, and not required, until Python 2.2.)

A major innovation in Python 2.2 was the unification of Python's types (types written in C), and classes (types written in Python) into one hierarchy. This single unification made Python's object model purely and consistently object oriented. Also added were generators which were inspired by Icon.

Java legacy

Python's standard library additions and syntactical choices were strongly influenced by Java in some cases: the logging package, introduced in version 2.3, the SAX parser, introduced in 2.0, and the decorator syntax that uses @, added in version 2.4

Future development

A Python Enhancement Proposal (or "PEP") is a standardized design document providing general information related to Python, including proposals, descriptions, and explanations for language features. PEPs are intended as the primary channel for proposing new features, and for documenting the underlying design rationale for all major elements of Python. Outstanding PEPs are reviewed and commented upon by van Rossum, the BDFL.

Python 3000

There are plans for a future version, to be called Python 3.0 (the project is called "Python 3000" or "Py3K") that will break backwards compatibility with the 2.x series in order to repair perceived flaws in the language. The guiding principle is to "reduce feature duplication by removing old ways of doing things".

Philosophy

Python 3.0 is being developed with the same philosophy as in prior versions, so any reference to Python philosophy will apply to Python 3.0 as well. However, as Python has accumulated new and redundant ways to program the same task, Python 3.0 has an emphasis on removing duplicative constructs and modules, in keeping with “There should be one—and preferably only one—obvious way to do it”.

Nonetheless, Python 3.0 will remain a multi-paradigm language. Coders will still have options among object orientation, structured programming, functional programming, and aspect-oriented programming and other paradigms, but within such broad choices, the details are intended to be more obvious in Python 3.0 than they have become in Python 2.x.

Timeline and compatibility

The first release candidate of Python 3.0 was released on September 17, 2008.^[22] The Python 2.x and Python 3.x series will coexist for several releases in parallel, where the 2.x series exists largely for compatibility and with some new features being backported from the 3.x series. PEP 3000 contains more information about the release schedule.

Python 3.0 will break backward compatibility. There is no requirement that Python 2.x code will run unmodified on Python 3.0. There are basic changes such as changing the print statement into a print function (so any use of print as a statement will cause the program to fail), and switching to Unicode for all text strings. Python's dynamic typing combined with the plans to change the semantics of certain methods of dictionaries, for example, makes perfect mechanical translation from Python 2.x to Python 3.0 very difficult. However, a tool called "2to3" does most of the job of translation, pointing out areas of uncertainty using comments or warnings. Even in an alpha stage, 2to3 appears to be fairly successful at performing the translation.^[23] PEP 3000 recommends keeping one source (for the 2.x series), and producing releases for the Python 3.x platform using 2to3. The resulting code should not be edited until the program no longer needs to run on Python 2.x.

Python 2.6 includes forward compatibility features, as well as a "warnings" mode that will warn of potential transition problems. Warnings will be reported for builtins which will no longer exist in 3.0, as well as various old Python 2.x features that Python 3.0 will remove (see PEP 361 for more information).

Features

Some of the major changes scheduled for Python 3.0 are:

• Changing print so that it is a built-in function, not a statement. This makes it easier to change a module to use a different print function, as well as making the syntax more regular. In Python 2.6 this can be enabled by entering from __future__ import print_function.
• Moving reduce (but not map or filter) out of the built-in namespace and into functools (the rationale being that operations using reduce are expressed more clearly using an accumulation loop);
• Adding support for optional function annotations that can be used for informal type declarations or other purposes;
• Unifying the str/unicode types, representing text, and introducing a separate immutable bytes type; and a mostly corresponding mutable bytearray type, which both represent arrays of bytes;
• Removing backward-compatibility features, including old-style classes, integer-truncating division, string exceptions, and implicit relative imports.