“An unusual event happened last week, on the 7th of September.
We had not one, but two releases of Python. The first to be
released was Python 1.6 from CNRI, the company that Guido van
Rossum, the creator of Python, used to work at. Python 1.6b1 has
been available for some time, so it wasn’t a complete surprise to
see the final version released.”
“However, just a few hours later, Python 2.0b1was released by
BeOpen, the organization that Guido and other members of the
development team moved to earlier this year. Version 2.0 is
actually the bigger of the two releases, including many more
features and is actually based on the 1.6 code. Since 2.0 is still
in its beta testing phase, most people will probably want to stick
to the 1.6 version. The libraries and binaries are all installed
with the version numbers attached, so you can safely keep all three
versions on your Linux machine concurrently, but make sure that you
update the link for /usr/local/bin/python to the version you want
to use.”
“Before we look at what’s new in version 2.0, let’s first look
at the changes in Python 1.6. Most of the changes in 1.6 relate to
tightening up of the language and resolving some of the bugs. There
also a lot of internal work that’s gone on to expand and
standardize some of the features. The rest of changes are fairly
straightforward.”