Python is a well known programming language that allows the development of web and desktop based applications of any degree of complexity and compatible with a wide range of existing operating systems. There are already used many popular frameworks, content management systems (like Plone) and CGI scripts built with Python.

Python Software Foundation has recently released Python 3.0 (final), which is ready for production usage. As compared with typical releases, Python 3.0 (Python 3000 or Py3K) is not compatible with any of 2.x versions. The language structure is in principle the same, but the management of built-in objects, such as dictionaries has changed, deprecated features were excluded and many other changes were performed.

For example, in Python 3.0 the print statement is not longer used, because it has been replaced with a corresponding function print() which accepts keyword arguments and has a simplified syntax.

Other notable changes in Python 3.0 are: instead of lists are used views and iterators, rules for ordering comparisons are simplified, Unicode and 8-bit strings are now text and binary data and a new syntax of the functions was implemented. Detailed information are available in Change Log and Online Documentation.

Regarding the performance of Python 3.0, certain benchmarks shows that Python 3.0 is slower with 10% as compared with Python 2.5 due to the absence of special casing for small integers. Python 3.0 is still easy to learn and the existing source code written for Python 2.5 or 2.6 can be ported to Python 3.0 with the help of an automated tool for source code translation.

Related Articles

• No related posts.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 8:27 am and is filed under IT News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.