Info: To follow along with the example code in this tutorial, open a Python interactive shell on your local system by running the python3 command. Then you can copy, paste, or edit the examples by adding them after the prompt. Online Python3 Compiler, Online Python3 Editor, Online Python3 IDE, Python3 Coding Online, Practice Python3 Online, Execute Python3 Online, Compile Python3 Online, Run Python3 Online, Online Python3 Interpreter, Execute Python-3 Online (Python v3.6.2). Testing run time of a code that depends on another function Python 3. If I have a code like: def foo (a): for i in range (len (a)): do something return a def main : while len (a) 1: n = int (a 0) print (foo ( (a :n+1))) a = a n+1:. What we seek in using multi-stage builds is to strip the final application image of all unnecessary files and software packages and to deliver only the files needed to run our Python code. A quick example of a multi-stage Dockerfile for our previous example is the following: # first stage FROM python:3.8 AS builder COPY requirements.txt.
2015-01-27 (original 2009-11-02; this is a light update)
I likePython; code written in Python tends to be very easy-to-read,and the massive number of libraries make it easy to make useful programs.It was a mistake to have not implemented both Python 2 and Python 3 in a single CPython executable. |
Python 3 is in many ways an improvement over Python 2, butit was a mistake to have not implemented both Python 2 and Python 3in a single executable widely used by most people (CPython).This mistake makes it very difficult to transition from Python 2 toa Python 3 implementation.If your program is small and doesn't use any libraries,transitioning tends to be easy;just use the '2to3' conversion program, fix up some problems manually,and you are off and running.But that's a weird special case, because Python is popular and hasspawned a massive number of libraries.Most Python programs depend on libraries, which depend on other libraries,which depend on other libraries (you get the point).If any library anywhere doesn't support Python 3, then nothing elsethat depends on it can use Python 3 either.So that means that every library you depend on (transitively!) mustsimultaneously switch to support Python 3 if you want to use Python 3.You also have to translate your entire program to Python 3, all at once;if your program is big, this is often impractical even with tools like 2to3.
Because of the library bottleneck, and the basic incompatibilities betweenPython 2 and Python 3,Python 3 uptake has been slow.Linux distributors find it painful to support Python 3 because of this(see this Fedora threadand theFedoraPython3 F13 page).
On2014-04-13 Guido van Rossum had to add another 5 years to the Python 2.7 end-of-life date (to 2020),and in the comments admitted that many users 'cannot yet migrate to Python 3'.Even the infrastructure supporting Python can't switch to Python 3.Mercurial,a popular program written in Python,has tried to move to Python 3 twice, and abandoned the effort because itdetermined that it would cost anadditional man-year of effort to make the switch.In case you missed the irony,the Python developersagreed to move Python development to mercurial (per PEP 385),most Python.org repositories have now moved from thePython.org subversion repositories to thePython.org mercurial Repositories.So Python.org is using a tool in Python to develop Python 3 that itselfhas abandoned switching to Python 3... because the transition toPython 3 is far too difficult.
The Python Wall of Superpowers(formerly Python Wall of Shame) shows many libraries support Python 3,but remember, if 99% of your Python 2 libraries also support Python 3,then you cannot use Python 3 and must use Python 2.Some libraries (such as Twisted, Zope2, and meld3) havedeclared that they will never support Python 3.Through herculean effort, a number of libraries and programs do now workon Python 3.But even as of 2014, every developer I know who uses Python uses Python 2,never Python 3 (and Python 3.0 was released in December 2008!).
I think it was a terrible mistake to have combinedchanging the programming language with switching to a differentC implementation.It is perfectly possible to have a single 'python' executable thatimplements both version 2 and version 3 semantics to allow mixingof the different notations.Then, any program could be written with the version 3 semantics, yetcall on libraries that were written with the version 2 semantics.There is a reason that people don't like backwards-incompatible changes;it makes transition rediculously hard.
The mailing lists sometimes talk about 'carrots' to use Python 3,but I think that is missing the point.The problem is not the lack of carrots.The problem is the landmines,barbed wire, and guns shooting at you if you try to transition existingPython 2 code to a Python 3 implementation.The transition is broken, not the destination.The transition is broken, not the destination. |
In a lot of cases it would better if wewrite Python programs that worked, without change, onboth Python 2 and Python 3 (where 'Python 3' really meansversion 3.3 or later).Then we don't have to muck with 2to3 (or 3to2) and other nonsense.This approach has been calledforwards-compatible Python.
Python 2.6includes many capabilities that make it easier to write codethat works on both 2.6 and 3.As a result, you can program in Python 2 but using certainPython 3 extensions... and the resulting code works on both.Python 2.6 has been out for a while, so for many people, requiring 2.6is a reasonable precondition.(Some people can mandate version 2.7, which is even easier.)Where that's too difficult, write in Python 2.6+, but add some of thesyntactic and semantic niceties of Python 3.Mark Summerfield has a nice summary of Python 2 and 3 idiom differences.
Although it's taken 5 years, it looks like the Python developers arefinally starting to see the light and have moved closer to my position.In 2014,Guido van Rossum summarized the PyCon conference,'... I do think we should make things better for people whohave to straddle Python 2 and 3 in a single codebase, by developing moretools, and by security and possibly installer updates to 2.7 (PEP 466)...Some suggestions that were made: PSF financial support fortool development and/or porting...additional 2to3 fixers to help convert Python-2-only code toPython-2-and-3-single-source code, a separate linter,a sumo 2.7 distribution that includes all knownbackported-from-Python-3-stdlib packages,...The recommended and least painful way to develop for Python 2 and 3is definitely to use a single source that runs under both withouttranslation; we no longer recommend auto-generating Python 3 compatiblesource code using 2to3, for a variety of reasons.'
A simple way to do this is to use Python 2.6+ for development andbegin each of your Python .py files with the following:
These switch to Python 3 meanings for key constructs.Now you use print(...) instead of a print statement,unicode strings, imports will always be absolute, and divisionwill create floating-point values as needed (i.e., 1/2 now returns 0.5).
Python 2.6 includes a number of Python 3 features by default(like support for 'bytes'), so you can just use them directly.In some cases, you should avoid using certain constructs and replacethem with another(my thanks toRunning the same code on Python 2.x and 3.x which points outsome of these).For example:Instead of | Use |
---|---|
d.has_key(k) | k in d |
d.itervalues() | d.values() |
callable(o) | hasattr(o, '__call__') |
Some code constructs require a little extra work to make them work thesame way in Python 2 and Python 3.For example, Python 3's 'range' is the same as Python 2's 'xrange'.We can do this by inserting after the 'from __future__' statementsthe following:
Now we can use 'xrange(...)' in the rest of the file, and it will workcorrectly.(You could use 'range()' directly, but in Python 2 this can be veryinefficient.)
You can also import packages and rename them.However, instead of trying to do all this yourself,try to use the 'six' module.The six module packages up many of these Python2/3 differencesand makes it easy to 'import whichever library I need'.
You can use python's '-3' flag when running Python 2 to warn you about code that will not cleanly transition to Python 2.Using that flag, and fixing what it finds over time, is a much more reasonabletransition approach than trying to change everything simultaneously.
One of the advantages of Python is that it's a clean language to read;too much of this stuff makes it too complicated.There's a philosophical question as to whether or not you write inPython 2 (with some modifications), or in a Python 3 that happens to workin Python 2.For example, do you choose to use 'xrange' or 'range' as the name in the code?I prefer working in 'python 2 with specific modifications' right now,for the following reasons:
- Libraries all work in Python 2, while few work in Python 3.Thus, in practice, to make libraries work you're really working in Python 2,so you may as well use the notation of the system as it really is.
- Python 2 is better-known, so the documentation (and so on)tends to be better.
- The '2to3' tool tries to translate Python 2 into Python 3, and at leasthas some success. The '3to2' tool is nowhere near as mature.
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Python 2 and Python 3 have some different library interfaces, andtrying to deal with all of that in each file can be awful.
Writing code that works in both 2 and 3 can become a serious pain,so when it gets too difficult, I abandon it, andmake the code work on a Python 2 that adds some features of 3.Over time, I can modify the code to be more 3-like, presuming that futureversions of Python 2 add notation from Python 3.This gives me a practical way to transition to Python 3, gradually, and thenuse 2to3 when all libraries have made that final step.By that point, the code differences will be trivial instead of thecurrent chasm.
One of the biggest challenges is handling Unicode, because Python 3is stricter about Unicode than Python 2.Generally, you want to encode into Unicode as you read data in, andonly encode back to bytes as you write it out(this is called the 'Unicode sandwich' approach).See theUnipain presentation,e.g., atPragmatic Unicode ~ or ~ How Do I Stop the Pain?, for more information.One nasty problem is that both Python 2 and Python 3 have a type called 'str'but they are completely different;Python 2 'str' is for bytes (NOT Unicode), while Python 3 is for Unicode(and NOT bytes).You can write code that works on both, but the mixing of namesis confusing.
The biggest problem with Python 3's approach to Unicodeis that it works fine when given perfectly-encoded Unicode data,and that you always know what this encoding is.Sounds great, but this is almost never true.For example,Unix filenames are not strings, they are byte sequencesthat may not be legal character sequences.Later versions of Python 3 have papered over this simple case(see PEP 383).You normally have no idea what the encoding of the standard input is;the officially-claimed one is often wrong, and it may not even have one.In other cases there is often either no information about theencoding, or the encoding data is wrong(the latter is especially common in CJK settings).Data often has a nonstandard mixture of different encodings, e.g.,many 'UTF-8' datasets are actuallymixtures of 1252 (particularly curly quotes) and UTF-8.This means that using chardet, or using the character set encodingas provided by response headers, is often worthless.Armin Ronacher in January 2014argues that'Python 2's way of dealing with Unicode is error prone and I am all infavour of improving it... [but] Python 3 is a step backwards and broughtso many more issues that I absolutely hate working with it.'In many cases you can useBeautifulSoup's UnicodeDammit class to figure out the encoding(it also has a 'detwingle' operator to handle data that isUTF-8 but also includes Windows-1252 characters for curling/smart quotes).Adiscussion on python-readability issue 42noted that Unicode Dammit often worked, butnot on Korean pages (where encodings are often wrong).
Pragmatic Unicodediscusses Unicode issues as follows:'Here's Fact of Life #4: You can't determine the encoding of a byte stringby examining it. You need to know through other means.For example, many protocols include ways to specify the encoding.Here we have examples from HTTP, HTML, XML, and Python source files.You may also know the encoding by prior arrangement,for example, the spec for a data source may specify the encoding.There are ways to guess at the encoding of the bytes, but they are justguesses. The only way to be sure of the encoding is to find it out someother way...Fact of Life #5: Sometimes you are told wrong.Unfortunately, because the encoding for bytes has to be communicated separately from the bytes themselves, sometimes the specified encoding is wrong. For example, you may pull an HTML page from a web server, and the HTTP header claims the page is 8859-1, but in fact, it is encoded with UTF-8.'These may be facts of life, but Python 3's design doesn't actuallysupport these facts of life very well... especially point #5.Python 3's design seems to presume that you always canknow what the encoding is, even though there is often no way to knowin a sure way what this encoding actually is.Indeed, Pragmatic Unicode presumes that there data uses somestandard encoding, even though real-world data is sometimes a mishmashof different encodings.Armin Ronacher points out in May 2014that these complexities make creating many real programs in Python 3much harder than in Python 2 (the opposite of what was intended).It may be possible to work with real-world data in Python 3 byreading bytes of data, and then combining thedata along with the claimed encoding information to infer the actual encoding(and to clean up data if it is not in any valid encoding).BeautifulSoup's UnicodeDammit class shows a plausible way to (potentially) get there.
I hope that the Python 2 C implementation will continue to beupgraded until it supports nearly all of the Python 3 features.In particular,I'd love to see 'import __future__ python3', which would try to make itas python3-like as possible,including the new Python 3 names and interfaces.Then programs and libraries couldeasily switch to version 3 features at their own pace,instead of requiring a 'flag day'.It would also mean that code could be quite clean.
PEP 477has added ensurepip to Python 2.7.9.A key reason is that this makes it easier to accessthird party modules for migration from Python 2 to Python 3,including six, modernize, and future.
I think it's plausible that Python users will eventually end up at Python 3,but the Python developers did a terrible job in handling the transition.Expecting everyone to instantaneously convert code, both their own andall libraries transitively, was a terrible and unworkable idea.Hopefully other language developers will learn from this situationand handle transition more gracefully.
Lots of other pages have similar info on making code work on both 2 and 3directly.A lot of them include doing this for versions of Python before 2.6, whichtends to be more work.These include:
Python 3 Code Runner Pdf
- Practical Python porting for systems programmers byby Peter A. Donis and Eric S. Raymond.
- Porting Python 2 Code to Python 3 discusses various options, and notes that'Over the years the Python community has discovered that the easiest wayto support both Python 2 and 3 in parallel is to write Python code thatworks in either version...supporting Python 2 & 3 simultaneously is typically thepreferred choice by people so that they can continue to improve codeand have it work for the most number of users...'It notes the 'modernize' tool, which tries to transform Python 2 code intocode that works on 2 or 3.It also mentions the 'future' project thatbackports Python 3 objects into Python 2, and the '-3' flag you can usein Python 2 to warn of potential incompatibilities with Python 3.
- Supporting Python 2 and 3without 2to3 conversion talks about this, and in particular discusseshow to use the 'six' module to help.
- Python-futureprovides 'the missing compatibility layer between Python 3 and Python 2';this is the sort of thing that should have been developed beforePython 3 was even released.
- Forwards-compatible Python also discusses this.This starts by saying,'For web applications the safest bet currently is to stick with Python2.x even for new projects[, for] the simple reason that right now wedon't have enough supporting libraries for Python 3 yet and porting someof them over is a huge step.'
- Making code work in python 2 and 3 hassome interesting notes.
- Python 3 Q & A discusses why they made the changes for Python 3. My problem is not with those changes (I like the changes in Python 3), it was the dramatically terrible transition approach that required all-or-nothing flag day transition (a terrible idea).
- Making code run on Python 2.0 through 3.0talks about making code run on anything from 2.0 on.
- 'Py3 support is like an unemployed cousin we'reletting crash on the couch: we're already annoyed that it's here, so it shouldtry not to stack up dirty dishes everywhere.'a mercurial comment on Python 3
Feel free to see my home page athttps://dwheeler.com.You may also want to look at my paperWhy OSS/FS? Look atthe Numbers! and my book onhow to developsecure programs.
Python 3 Code Runner Online
(C) Copyright 2009 David A. Wheeler.