Download Python 3.0b2 / 2.6b2

Python is an object-oriented programming language that can be used to develop simple to complex platform-independent applications. The developers of this programming language have released two new beta versions, namely 3.0 beta 2 and 2.6 beta 2. The 3.0 series is no longer backwards compatible with the previous version branches because they want to clean the language of old code and fix some existing design flaws. Version 2.6 will have partial forward compatibility to the 2.x line to add so that programmers can more easily transfer their applications to Python 3.0 by already supporting new functions. The complete list of changes for Python 3.0 is up this page to read and for the list of Python 2.6 you can go on this page justly. The list of changes for version 3.0 beta 2 is as follows:

What’s new in Python 3.0b2?

Core and Builtins:

• Issue #3008: the float type has a new instance method ‘float.hex’ and a new class method ‘float.fromhex’ to convert floating-point numbers to and from hexadecimal strings, respectively.
• Issue #3083: Add alternate (#) formatting for bin, oct, hex output for str.format(). This adds the prefix 0b, 0o, or 0x, respectively.
• Issue #3280: like chr(), the “%c” format now accepts unicode code points beyond the Basic Multilingual Plane (above 0xffff) on all configurations. On “narrow Unicode” builds, the result is a string of 2 code units, forming a UTF-16 surrogate pair.
• Issue #3282: str.isprintable() should return False for undefined Unicode characters.
• Issue #3236: Return small longs from PyLong_FromString.
• Exception tracebacks now support exception chaining.

Library:

• Issue #3313: Fixed a crash when a failed dlopen() call does not set a valid dlerror() message.
• Issue #3258: Fixed a crash when a ctypes POINTER type to an incomplete structure was created.
• Issue #2683: Fix inconsistency in subprocess.Popen.communicate(): the argument now must be a bytes object in any case.
• Issue #3145: help(“modules whatever”) failed when trying to load the source code of every single module of the standard library, including invalid files used in the test suite.
• The gettext library now consistently uses Unicode strings for message ids and message strings, and “ugettext()“ and the like don’t exist anymore.
• The traceback module has been expanded to handle chained exceptions.

C API:

• Issue #3247: the function Py_FindMethod was removed. Modern types should use the tp_methods slot instead.

Tools/Demos:

• The Mac/Demos directory has been removed.
• All of the Mac scripts have been removed (including BuildApplet.py).