David Mertz

Python is a great language for text processing. Each new version of Python--but especially the 3.x series--has enhanced this strength of the language. String (and byte) objects have grown some handy methods and some built-in functions have improved or been added. More importantly, refinements and additions have been made to the standard library to cover the most common tasks in text processing.

This talk traces lightweight concurrency from Python 2.2's generators, which enabled semi-coroutines as a mechanism for scheduling "weightless" threads; to PEP 342, which created true coroutines, and hence made event-driven programming easier; to 3rd party libraries built around coroutines, from older GTasklet and peak.events to the current Greenlet/gevent and Twisted Reactor.