In Python 3, backticks (``) are being removed. The plan is to create an automatic way to port python2 programs to python3, so my question is: What are backticks going to be translated into? I tried looking at the 2to3 fixer source code, but as far as I can tell they haven't written that part yet. http://svn.python.org/view/sandbox/trunk/2to3/lib2to3/fixes/