10 Recent Additions as of Release 1.1

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.

• 10.1 The Last Printed Expression
• 10.2 String Literals
  • 10.2.1 Double Quotes
  • 10.2.2 Continuation Of String Literals
  • 10.2.3 Triple-quoted strings
  • 10.2.4 String Literal Juxtaposition
• 10.3 The Formatting Operator
  • 10.3.1 Basic Usage
  • 10.3.2 Referencing Variables By Name
• 10.4 Optional Function Arguments
  • 10.4.1 Default Argument Values
  • 10.4.2 Arbitrary Argument Lists
• 10.5 Lambda And Functional Programming Tools
  • 10.5.1 Lambda Forms
  • 10.5.2 Map, Reduce and Filter
    • Map.
    • Filter.
    • Reduce.
• 10.6 Continuation Lines Without Backslashes
• 10.7 Regular Expressions
• 10.8 Generalized Dictionaries
• 10.9 Miscellaneous New Built-in Functions
• 10.10 Else Clause For Try Statement
• 10.11 New Class Features in Release 1.1
  • 10.11.1 New Operator Overloading
  • 10.11.2 Trapping Attribute Access
  • 10.11.3 Calling a Class Instance