Summary
Another milestone in Python 3000 development: alpha 2 is released. Now with immutable bytes!

This is just a quick post to let everyone know that Python 3.0a2 is released as of 10:30am PST (18:30 UTC) today (Friday December 7, 2007).

I'm grateful to the many people who have contributed to this release, in particular new core developers Christian Heimes and Amaury Forgeot d'Arc.

I wish I could list the many things that are new since 3.0a1 was released on August 31, but there are already many places where you can read up on that, so I'll skip this now.

However, I do want to mention that based upon the feedback for 3.0a1, we've decided to make the 'bytes' type immutable, and create a separate mutable bytes type, 'bytearray'. These two types are mutually compatible, but in the majority of cases you'll be using bytes, not bytearray.

I should also note that we've run into an issue with the Windows installers -- see the release page above. If anyone can help this, please write to python-dev at python.org. (The script that creates the installer is in the distribution as Tools/msi/msi.py.)

And finally, a word of thanks to all the GHOP contestants who contributed documentation updates, and to Georg Brandl for collecting these and submitting them to Subversion. There are still many more tasks available!

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About the Blogger

Guido van Rossum is the creator of Python, one of the major programming languages on and off the web. The Python community refers to him as the BDFL (Benevolent Dictator For Life), a title straight from a Monty Python skit. He moved from the Netherlands to the USA in 1995, where he met his wife. Until July 2003 they lived in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC with their son Orlijn, who was born in 2001. They then moved to Silicon Valley where Guido now works for Google (spending 50% of his time on Python!).