Recent Additions

Python is an evolving language. Since this tutorial was last thoroughly revised, several new features have been added to the language. While ideally I should revise the tutorial to incorporate them in the mainline of the text, lack of time currently requires me to take a more modest approach. In this chapter I will briefly list the most important improvements to the language and how you can use them to your benefit.

• The Last Printed Expression
• String Literals
  • Double Quotes
  • Continuation Of String Literals
  • Triple-quoted strings
  • String Literal Juxtaposition
• The Formatting Operator
  • Basic Usage
  • Referencing Variables By Name
• Optional Function Arguments
  • Default Argument Values
  • Arbitrary Argument Lists
• Lambda And Functional Programming Tools
  • Lambda Forms
  • Map, Reduce and Filter
    • Map.
    • Filter.
    • Reduce.
• Continuation Lines Without Backslashes
• Regular Expressions
• Generalized Dictionaries
• Miscellaneous New Built-in Functions
• Else Clause For Try Statement
• New Class Features in Release 1.1
  • New Operator Overloading
  • Trapping Attribute Access
  • Calling a Class Instance