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A.M. Kuchling and Moshe Zadka
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A new release of Python, version 2.0, was released on October 16, 2000. This article covers the exciting new features in 2.0, highlights some other useful changes, and points out a few incompatible changes that may require rewriting code.
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Python's development never completely stops between releases, and a steady flow of bug fixes and improvements are always being submitted. A host of minor fixes, a few optimizations, additional docstrings, and better error messages went into 2.0; to list them all would be impossible, but they're certainly significant. Consult the publicly-available CVS logs if you want to see the full list. This progress is due to the five developers working for PythonLabs are now getting paid to spend their days fixing bugs, and also due to the improved communication resulting from moving to SourceForge.
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Python 1.6 can be thought of as the Contractual Obligations Python release. After the core development team left CNRI in May 2000, CNRI requested that a 1.6 release be created, containing all the work on Python that had been performed at CNRI. Python 1.6 therefore represents the state of the CVS tree as of May 2000, with the most significant new feature being Unicode support. Development continued after May, of course, so the 1.6 tree received a few fixes to ensure that it's forward-compatible with Python 2.0. 1.6 is therefore part of Python's evolution, and not a side branch.
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So, should you take much interest in Python 1.6? Probably not. The 1.6final and 2.0beta1 releases were made on the same day (September 5, 2000), the plan being to finalize Python 2.0 within a month or so. If you have applications to maintain, there seems little point in breaking things by moving to 1.6, fixing them, and then having another round of breakage within a month by moving to 2.0; you're better off just going straight to 2.0. Most of the really interesting features described in this document are only in 2.0, because a lot of work was done between May and September.
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