Soft deprecations

There are no plans to remove soft deprecated APIs.

• re.match() and re.Pattern.match() are now soft deprecated in favor of the new re.prefixmatch() and re.Pattern.prefixmatch() APIs, which have been added as alternate, more explicit names. These are intended to be used to alleviate confusion around what match means by following the Zen of Python’s “Explicit is better than implicit” mantra. Most other language regular expression libraries use an API named match to mean what Python has always called search.

  We do not plan to remove the older match() name, as it has been used in code for over 30 years. Code supporting older versions of Python should continue to use match(), while new code should prefer prefixmatch(). See prefixmatch() vs. match().

  (Contributed by Gregory P. Smith in gh-86519 and Hugo van Kemenade in gh-148100.)