Newbie question - probably FAQ (but not exactly answered by regular FAQ)

[Nick Craig-Wood]

Banibrata Dutta <banibrata.dutta at gmail.com> wrote:
>  As such 2.6 & 3.0 are also cooking, but from what I see on the mailing
>  list, some of the features are a bit controversial. So if I start with
>  2.5 now, unless there are some break-thru preformance gains, or
>  annoying defects fixed, I'd stick to it. If I can do something
>  "well-enough" with 2.5, I'd not refactor for 2.6, for quite some
>  fore-seeable future.

I started programming with python at version 2.0 so I've seen it
evolve over the years.

In case you are interested here are some links to what has changed
from the different versions over the years.

 2.0: http://www.amk.ca/python/2.0/
 2.1: http://www.amk.ca/python/2.1/
 2.2: http://www.python.org/doc/2.2.3/whatsnew/
 2.3: http://www.python.org/doc/2.3/whatsnew/
 2.4: http://www.python.org/doc/2.4.3/whatsnew/whatsnew24.html
 2.5: http://docs.python.org/whatsnew/whatsnew25.html
 2.5: http://docs.python.org/dev/whatsnew/2.6.html

I personally wouldn't like to use older than 2.2 any more.  I find new
style classes, iterators and generators to be invaluable.

Features I like from 2.3's are enumerate, csv and datetime modules.

And from 2.4 I like the subprocess module (though it runs on 2.3 just
fine too - it just isn't included).  I have occasionally used the
decorator syntax, but since it is syntactic sugar anyway it isn't
absolutely necessary.

In 2.5 has ctypes which is great though it is available as a 3rd party
module for 2.3 and 2.4.  As is sqlite3.

So in my opinion the real difference between the 2.2, 2.3, 2.4 and 2.5
are the built in modules.  The actual language changes are very minor.

If you write your code for 2.5 which is probably a good idea, you'll
have no problem backporting it to 2.4, 2.3 or even 2.2 should that be
necessary.

-- 
Nick Craig-Wood <nick at craig-wood.com> -- http://www.craig-wood.com/nick