Whats New In Python 3.1

PEPs

  • Added OrderedDict in collections module- Built-in format(): format(1234567.89, ',.2f') => '1,234,567.89'

Other Language Changes

  • Directories and zip archives containing a __main__.py file can be executed by passing their names to the interpreter.
  • bit_length(): n = 2**123-1; n.bit_length() => 123
  • 'Sir {} of {}'.format('Foo', 'Bar')'
  • string.maketrans() was replaced by bytes.maketrans()
  • with statement: with open('a.txt') as infile, open('b.txt') as outfile:
  • round(x, n) now returns integer if x is an integer
  • repr(1.1) now is '1.1', previously, it's '1.1000000000000001'

New, Improved, and Deprecated Modules

  • Added collections.Counter class to support counting of unique items in a sequence.
  • Added a new module tkinter.ttk for access to the Tk themed widget set.
  • The gzip.GzipFile and bz2.BZ2File classes now support the context manager protocol (the with .. as statement)
  • The decimal module now supports methods for creating a decimal from float: Decimal.from_float(1.1)
  • The itertools module grew two new functions. The itertools.combinations_with_replacement() for generating combinatorics including permutations and Cartesian products. The itertools.compress() mimics namesake from APL.
  • Added the rename argument for collections.namedtuple()
  • The re.sub(), re.subn() and re.split() now accept a flags parameter.
  • The logging module now implements a simple logging.NullHandler class.
  • The runny which supports the -m switch now supports the execution the __main__ when a package name is supplied.
  • The pdb now support zipimport codes
  • functools.partial objects can now be pickled.
  • The unit test module now supports skipping individual tests or classes of tests. And it supports marking a test as a expected failure. @unittest.skipUnless(sys.platform.startswith("win"), "requires Windows") and @unittest.expectedFailure
  • Also, tests for exceptions have been builtout to use with statement. More assertion methods were added like assertTupleEqual(), assertSequenceEqual(), etc.
  • The io module has three new constants for the seek() method. SEEK_SET, etc
  • A new module importlib was added. It provides a complete, portable, pure Python reference implementation of the import and __import__().

Optimizations

Major performance enhancements have been added:

  • The I/O library has been entirely rewritten in C and is 2 to 20 times faster than it in Python 3.0 (The python version is still available at _pyio for experimentation purposes.
  • Added a heuristic so that tuples and dicts containing only untrackable objects are not tracked by the garbage collector.
  • The decoding of UTF-8, UTF-16, and LATIN-1 is now two to four times faster.
  • The json module now has a C extension to substantially improve its performance.
  • Unpickling now interns the attribute names of pickled objects. This save memory and allow pickles to be smaller.