03 Non-essential Built-in Functions

There are several built-in functions that are no longer essential to learn, know or use in modern Python programming. They have been kept here to maintain backwards compatibility with programs written for older versions of Python.

Python programmers, trainers, students and book writers should feel free to bypass these functions without concerns about missing something important.

apply(function, args[, keywords])

The function argument must be a callable object (a user-defined or built-in function or method, or a class object) and the args argument must be a sequence. The function is called with args as the argument list; the number of arguments is the length of the tuple. If the optional keywords argument is present, it must be a dictionary whose keys are strings. It specifies keyword arguments to be added to the end of the argument list. Calling apply() is different from just calling function(args), since in that case there is always exactly one argument. The use of apply() is equivalent to function(*args, **keywords).

Deprecated since version 2.3: Use function(*args, **keywords) instead of apply(function, args, keywords) (see tut-unpacking-arguments).

buffer(object[, offset[, size]])

The object argument must be an object that supports the buffer call interface (such as strings, arrays, and buffers). A new buffer object will be created which references the object argument. The buffer object will be a slice from the beginning of object (or from the specified offset). The slice will extend to the end of object (or will have a length given by the size argument).

coerce(x, y)

Return a tuple consisting of the two numeric arguments converted to a common type, using the same rules as used by arithmetic operations. If coercion is not possible, raise TypeError.

intern(string)

Enter string in the table of “interned” strings and return the interned string – which is string itself or a copy. Interning strings is useful to gain a little performance on dictionary lookup – if the keys in a dictionary are interned, and the lookup key is interned, the key comparisons (after hashing) can be done by a pointer compare instead of a string compare. Normally, the names used in Python programs are automatically interned, and the dictionaries used to hold module, class or instance attributes have interned keys.

Changed in version 2.3: Interned strings are not immortal (like they used to be in Python 2.2 and before); you must keep a reference to the return value of intern() around to benefit from it.

Footnotes

[1]	It is used relatively rarely so does not warrant being made into a statement.

[2]

Specifying a buffer size currently has no effect on systems that don’t have setvbuf(). The interface to specify the buffer size is not done using a method that calls setvbuf(), because that may dump core when called after any I/O has been performed, and there’s no reliable way to determine whether this is the case.

[3]	In the current implementation, local variable bindings cannot normally be affected this way, but variables retrieved from other scopes (such as modules) can be. This may change.