On behalf of the Python development team, I'm effusive to announce the first release candidate 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. However, 2.7 will have an extended period of bugfix maintenance. 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 preview release and is thus not suitable for production use, we strongly encourage Python application and library developers to test the release with their code and report any bugs they encounter to: http://bugs.python.org/ This helps ensure that those upgrading to Python 2.7 will encounter as few bumps as possible. 2.7 documentation can be found at: http://docs.python.org/2.7/ Enjoy! -- Benjamin Peterson Release Manager benjamin at python.org (on behalf of the entire python-dev team and 2.7's contributors)