This is a static archive of the Python wiki, which was retired in February 2026 due to lack of usage and the resources necessary to serve it — predominately to bots, crawlers, and LLM companies.
Pages are preserved as they were at the time of archival. For current information, please visit python.org.
If a change to this archive is absolutely needed, requests can be made via the infrastructure@python.org mailing list.

The largest part of the the 2to3 runtime is spent in the pattern matching algorithm. This currently uses a fairly naive back-tracking approach. Replacing it with an algorithm based on the computation of finite state machines out of the patterns should allow efficient simultaneous matching of patterns with many alternatives. Interested students should contact martin@v.loewis.de.


2026-02-14 16:13