
``__future__`` --- Future statement definitions
***********************************************

``__future__`` is a real module, and serves three purposes:

* To avoid confusing existing tools that analyze import statements and
  expect to find the modules they're importing.

* To ensure that future_statements run under releases prior to 2.1 at
  least yield runtime exceptions (the import of ``__future__`` will
  fail, because there was no module of that name prior to 2.1).

* To document when incompatible changes were introduced, and when they
  will be --- or were --- made mandatory.  This is a form of
  executable documentation, and can be inspected programmatically via
  importing ``__future__`` and examining its contents.

Each statement in ``__future__.py`` is of the form:

   FeatureName = _Feature(OptionalRelease, MandatoryRelease,
                          CompilerFlag)

where, normally, *OptionalRelease* is less than *MandatoryRelease*,
and both are 5-tuples of the same form as ``sys.version_info``:

   (PY_MAJOR_VERSION, # the 2 in 2.1.0a3; an int
    PY_MINOR_VERSION, # the 1; an int
    PY_MICRO_VERSION, # the 0; an int
    PY_RELEASE_LEVEL, # "alpha", "beta", "candidate" or "final"; string
    PY_RELEASE_SERIAL # the 3; an int
   )

*OptionalRelease* records the first release in which the feature was
accepted.

In the case of a *MandatoryRelease* that has not yet occurred,
*MandatoryRelease* predicts the release in which the feature will
become part of the language.

Else *MandatoryRelease* records when the feature became part of the
language; in releases at or after that, modules no longer need a
future statement to use the feature in question, but may continue to
use such imports.

*MandatoryRelease* may also be ``None``, meaning that a planned
feature got dropped.

Instances of class ``_Feature`` have two corresponding methods,
``getOptionalRelease()`` and ``getMandatoryRelease()``.

*CompilerFlag* is the (bitfield) flag that should be passed in the
fourth argument to the built-in function ``compile()`` to enable the
feature in dynamically compiled code.  This flag is stored in the
``compiler_flag`` attribute on ``_Feature`` instances.

No feature description will ever be deleted from ``__future__``.

See also:

   *Future statements*
      How the compiler treats future imports.
