Doc/deprecations/soft-deprecations.rst
There are no plans to remove :term:soft deprecated APIs.
:func:re.match and :meth:re.Pattern.match are now
:term:soft deprecated in favor of the new :func:re.prefixmatch and
:meth: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 :func:!match name, as it has been
used in code for over 30 years. Code supporting older versions of Python
should continue to use :func:!match, while new code should prefer
:func:!prefixmatch. See :ref:prefixmatch-vs-match.
(Contributed by Gregory P. Smith in :gh:86519 and
Hugo van Kemenade in :gh:148100.)