Pyrsistent is a number of persistent collections (by some referred to as functional data structures). Persistent in the sense that they are immutable.
All methods on a data structure that would normally mutate it instead return a new copy of the structure containing the requested updates. The original structure is left untouched.
This will simplify the reasoning about what a program does since no hidden side effects ever can take place to these data structures. You can rest assured that the object you hold a reference to will remain the same throughout its lifetime and need not worry that somewhere five stack levels below you in the darkest corner of your application someone has decided to remove that element that you expected to be there.
Pyrsistent is influenced by persistent data structures such as those found in the standard library of Clojure. The data structures are designed to share common elements through path copying. It aims at taking these concepts and make them as pythonic as possible so that they can be easily integrated into any python program without hassle.
If you want to go all in on persistent data structures and use literal syntax to define them in your code rather than function calls check out Pyrthon.
Examples
The collection types and key features currently implemented are:
PVector, similar to a python list
PMap, similar to dict
PSet, similar to set
PRecord, a PMap on steroids with fixed fields, optional type and invariant checking and much more
PClass, a Python class fixed fields, optional type and invariant checking and much more
Checked collections, PVector, PMap and PSet with optional type and invariance checks and more
PBag, similar to collections.Counter
PList, a classic singly linked list
PDeque, similar to collections.deque
Immutable object type (immutable) built on the named tuple
freeze and thaw functions to convert between pythons standard collections and pyrsistent collections.
Flexible transformations of arbitrarily complex structures built from PMaps and PVectors.
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