Dealing With Deprecated Keywords

00:00 In the last lesson you learned how to identify keywords, but what about those words that aren’t a keyword anymore? You will learn about them in this lesson.

00:11 There are two keywords that were deprecated in Python 3.0, print and exec. In the release notes of Python 3.0, you got the reasoning for it: “The print statement has been replaced with a print() function, with keyword arguments to replace most of the special syntax of the old print statement.” And later, “Removed keyword: exec() is no longer a keyword; it remains as a function.”

00:41 So both former keywords have been basically replaced by a function with the same name. Does that mean that you are free to use them now? Well, let me show you why you still shouldn’t use them as a variable name in your code. So when you just type print, then you will see that it’s a built-in function and not a keyword.

01:05 And that means you can actually say, my variable name is print and I give it the string value of "CMYK". And if I call it, then CMYK is returned. However, if you want to use the print() function at any point later in your code, then you will get a TypeError, and this can really mess up your code. So don’t use print or exec as variable names.

01:39 It’s important to note that this word of caution isn’t just for the former print keyword, which is now a function. Basically you have to be careful every time when you reassign a built-in function with a variable name because you’re allowed to do this, but it’s not a good idea.

02:01 And I guess this is everything that I wanted to say about this topic. In the next lesson, I will recap this course and I will give you ideas about what to do next.