On behalf of the Python development team, I'm merry to announce the first beta release of Python 2.7. Python 2.7 is scheduled (by Guido and Python-dev) to be the last major version in the 2.x series. Though more major releases have not been absolutely ruled out, it's likely that the 2.7 release will an extended period of maintenance for the 2.x series. 2.7 includes many features that were first released in Python 3.1. The faster io module, the new nested with statement syntax, improved float repr, set literals, dictionary views, and the memoryview object have been backported from 3.1. Other features include an ordered dictionary implementation, unittests improvements, a new sysconfig module, and support for ttk Tile in Tkinter. For a more extensive list of changes in 2.7, see http://doc.python.org/dev/whatsnew/2.7.html or Misc/NEWS in the Python distribution. To download Python 2.7 visit: http://www.python.org/download/releases/2.7/ While this is a development release and is thus not suitable for production use, we encourage Python application and library developers to test the release with their code and report any bugs they encounter. The 2.7 documentation can be found at: http://docs.python.org/2.7 Please consider trying Python 2.7 with your code and reporting any bugs you may notice to: http://bugs.python.org Enjoy! -- Benjamin Peterson 2.7 Release Manager benjamin at python.org (on behalf of the entire python-dev team and 2.7's contributors)