* replace superfluous single-character regex character
classes with their literal string equivalents; this
avoids the overhead associated with a character class
when there's only a single character enclosed (so there's
no benefit to the class overhead)

* for more information see:
Chapter 6 of:
Friedl, Jeffrey. Mastering Regular Expressions. 3rd ed.,
O’Reilly Media, 2009.

As numpy is Python 3 only, these import statements are now unnecessary
and don't alter runtime behavior.

Not super important, but saves some lines. Only the low-hanging ones here.

Found while tracking down an unrelated ResourceWarning

Replaced the usage of exec_command() in distutils ibm module with subprocess.check_output

In Python 3.6 a number of escape sequences that were previously accepted
-- for instance "\(" that was translated to "\\(" -- are deprecated. To
retain the previous behavior either raw strings must be used or the
backslash must be properly escaped itself.

Run the 2to3 ws_comma fixer on *.py files. Some lines are now too long
and will need to be broken at some point. OTOH, some lines were already
too long and need to be broken at some point. Now seems as good a time
as any to do this with open PRs at a minimum.

The idioms fixer makes the following replacements.

1) int <- bool
2) comparison or identity of types <- isinstance
3) a.sort() <- sorted(a)

There were two problems that needed to be dealt with after the
application of the fixer. First, the replacement of comparison or
identity of types by isinstance was not always correct.  The isinstance
function returns true for subtypes whereas many of the places where the
fixer made a substitution needed to check for exact type equality.
Second, the sorted function was applied to arrays, but because it treats
them as iterators and constructs a sorted list from the result, that is
the wrong thing to do.

Closes #3062.

Add `print_function` to all `from __future__ import ...` statements
and use the python3 print function syntax everywhere.

Closes #3078.

The new import `absolute_import` is added the `from __future__ import`
statement and The 2to3 `import` fixer is run to make the imports
compatible. There are several things that need to be dealt with to make
this work.

1) Files meant to be run as scripts run in a different environment than
files imported as part of a package, and so changes to those files need
to be skipped. The affected script files are:

    * all setup.py files
    * numpy/core/code_generators/generate_umath.py
    * numpy/core/code_generators/generate_numpy_api.py
    * numpy/core/code_generators/generate_ufunc_api.py

2) Some imported modules are not available as they are created during
the build process and consequently 2to3 is unable to handle them
correctly. Files that import those modules need a bit of extra work.
The affected files are:

    * core/__init__.py,
    * core/numeric.py,
    * core/_internal.py,
    * core/arrayprint.py,
    * core/fromnumeric.py,
    * numpy/__init__.py,
    * lib/npyio.py,
    * lib/function_base.py,
    * fft/fftpack.py,
    * random/__init__.py

Closes #3172