Walking Randomly

If you really want to learn the differences between Python 2 and Python 3, I suggest you try converting a non-trivial software project. I’m in the middle of doing one now and am learning all kinds of little gotchas over and above the standard stuff that everyone knows such as changes to print, integer division and removal of xrange.

The most recent one I learned about (about 10 minutes ago) amounted to this

#Python 2.7.6 (default, Mar 22 2014, 22:59:56) 
[GCC 4.8.2] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> [x for x in range(10)]
[0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
>>> x
9

compared to

Python 3.4.0 (default, Apr 11 2014, 13:05:11) 
[GCC 4.8.2] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> [x for x in range(10)]
[0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
>>> x
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in 
NameError: name 'x' is not defined

This is well documented (This StackOverflow Q+A is great!) but I didn’t know about it and, in the code I was looking at, there was a heck of a lot of complication between the list comprehension and when ‘x’ was used. As such, it took me a while to figure out!

Another change that had me scratching my head for a while is the fact that Python 3 ignores the __metaclass__ hook. I didn’t know this little fact but discovered it while debugging failing tests!

Of course, once you know these little gotchas, you’ll probably not be caught out by them again in your next Python 2->Python 3 porting project but they got me wondering…..

What changes from Python 2->Python 3 have really caught you out at some point?