[Python-Dev] Banishing apply(), buffer(), coerce(), and intern()

[Raymond Hettinger]

> > Yes, backticks will be gone in 3.0.  But I expect there's no hope of
> > getting rid of them earlier -- they've been used too much.  I
suspect
> 
> Then let's kill all use of backticks in the standard library. There's
> a lot of them.

Advisory from a micro-performance hawk:  Backticks are faster than
repr()

>>> from timeit import Timer
>>> min(Timer('`x`', 'x=1').repeat(3))
1.4857213496706265
>>> min(Timer('repr(x)', 'x=1').repeat(3))
1.7748914665012876


Raymond Hettinger