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Python 3.0 won't be compatible with earlier versions


By Alex Handy
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October 8, 2008 —  Python developers will soon have a tough decision to make: Move to a new Python, or stay forever bound to version 2.5 or earlier. On the Sept. 30, Python 2.6 was released, and it included a multitude of new features and adjustments to help ease users into the dramatic shift that will come with Python 3.0.

Scheduled for release later this year, Python 3.0 will bring a complete break with the past, rendering old code incompatible. While version 2.6 will bridge many gaps and prepare users for the forthcoming shift, 3.0 code will never run on any Python of the 2.x variety, and only some 2.x code will work on version 3.0.

A.M. Kuchling, a developer at radio simulation company ASTi and a contributor to the Python project, wrote an extensive description of the changes in Python 2.6 and how they relate to the forthcoming 3.0 version. Many of the changes in Python 2.6, such as the improvements made to SSL, inclusion of JSON interchanges and the rewriting of the warnings module in C, aren't destructive to older Python applications. Elsewhere, however, Kuchling details the places where even Python 2.6 is incompatible with previous editions.

While Python 3.0 will bring in many new conventions and syntax forms, version 2.6 includes some of these features as bridges between old and new. Many of these are hand-holding mechanisms  to prevent problems when the major changes of version 3.0 arrive, such as the backporting of the new format () method, which was scheduled to arrive in version 3.0 but will now also be available in version 2.6.

Those changes are so deep as to affect even the humble Print statement. As of version 2.6, Print can be triggered as a function with brackets delineating what will be printed to the screen. Python 3.0 will only allow this use of Print, but version 2.6 includes facilities for automatically fixing older applications that may not use this form.

Local installations of Python will now support the designation of user-based library storage directories. In the past, Python has stored all such libraries and support files in a single directory, but with Python 2.6 and beyond, individual users can be given directories inside of the default storage tree.

Python also received a multiprocessing function, which can be used to spin up a fresh process, then tie the results back to the mainline with a message queue.

Numerous other features have been changed or modified within the language, and Kuchling's report on the matter is deeply detailed. It can be found online at docs.python.org/whatsnew/2.6.html.




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