[Python-Dev] Python 2.x and 3.x use survey, 2014 edition

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Tue, 16 Dec 2014 19:25:35 +0000
Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:
> 
> As for the changing of the default in Python 3, that's because we decided
> to make iterators the default everywhere. And that was mostly for
> consistency, not performance reasons. It was also for flexibility as you
> can go from an iterator to a list by just wrapping the iterator in list(),
> but you can't go the other way around.

And two other reasons:
- the API becomes simpler to use as there's no need to choose
  between .items() and .iteritems(), etc.
- the 3.x methods don't return iterators but views, which have set-like
  features in addition to basic iterating

Regards

Antoine.