Excerpts

Python 3000 (a.k.a. "Py3k", and released as Python 3.0) is a new version of the language that is incompatible with the 2.x line of releases. The language is mostly the same, but many details, especially how built-in objects like dictionaries and strings work, have changed considerably, and a lot of deprecated features have finally been removed.

This is an ongoing project; the cleanup isn't expected to be complete until 2008. In particular there are plans to reorganize the standard library namespace.

The release plan is to have a series of alpha releases in 2007, beta releases in 2008, and a final release in August 2008. The alpha releases are primarily aimed at developers who want a sneak peek at the new langauge, especially those folks who plan to port their code to Python 3000. The hope is that by the time of the final release, many 3rd party packages will already be available in a 3.0-compatible form.

More links

• Online docs: http://docs.python.org/dev/3.0/
• What's new: http://docs.python.org/dev/3.0/whatsnew/3.0.html
• Source tar ball: http://python.org/ftp/python/3.0/Python-3.0a1.tgz
• Windows MSI installer: http://python.org/ftp/python/3.0/python-3.0a1.msi
• PEP 3000: http://python.org/dev/peps/pep-3000/
• Issue tracker: http://bugs.python.org/
• Py3k dev list: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000/
• Conversion tool for Python 2.x code: http://svn.python.org/view/sandbox/trunk/2to3/