RELEASED Python 2.6a1 and 3.0a3

[Paul Boddie]

On 2 Mar, 10:02, Kay Schluehr <kay.schlu... at gmx.net> wrote:
> On 2 Mrz., 06:53, Ben Finney <bignose+hates-s... at benfinney.id.au>
> wrote:
>
> > One of the stated goals of the migration is that the '2to3' program
> > will only migrate Python 2.6 code -> Python 3.0 code.
>
> Yes, I know. Why?
>
> "The master said so" isn't an entirely satisfying answer. What are the
> *technical reasons* that make it hard to apply '2to3' directly on
> Python 2.4 or Python 2.5?

I imagine that in Python 2.6 there are some semantic changes
(conveniences, really), plus some expansion of the language syntax to
overlap with Python 3, both of which let the 2to3 tool work as
intended. Obviously 2to3 doesn't do too much complicated stuff, and I
imagine (or have deduced from what I've heard) that you have to write
code that is "obvious" to the tool so that it can translate it
correctly. Perhaps 2.5 and earlier don't permit such obvious code to
be written.

Paul