On behalf of the Python development community and the Python 3.6 release team, I'm pleased to announce the availability of Python 3.6.0b4. 3.6.0b4 is the last planned beta release of Python 3.6, the next major release of Python. Among the new major new features in Python 3.6 are: * PEP 468 - Preserving the order of **kwargs in a function * PEP 487 - Simpler customization of class creation * PEP 495 - Local Time Disambiguation * PEP 498 - Literal String Formatting * PEP 506 - Adding A Secrets Module To The Standard Library * PEP 509 - Add a private version to dict * PEP 515 - Underscores in Numeric Literals * PEP 519 - Adding a file system path protocol * PEP 520 - Preserving Class Attribute Definition Order * PEP 523 - Adding a frame evaluation API to CPython * PEP 524 - Make os.urandom() blocking on Linux (during system startup) * PEP 525 - Asynchronous Generators (provisional) * PEP 526 - Syntax for Variable Annotations (provisional) * PEP 528 - Change Windows console encoding to UTF-8 * PEP 529 - Change Windows filesystem encoding to UTF-8 * PEP 530 - Asynchronous Comprehensions Please see "What’s New In Python 3.6" for more information: https://docs.python.org/3.6/whatsnew/3.6.html You can find Python 3.6.0b4 here: https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-360b4/ Beta releases are intended to give the wider community the opportunity to test new features and bug fixes and to prepare their projects to support the new feature release. We strongly encourage maintainers of third-party Python projects to test with 3.6 during the beta phase and report issues found to bugs.python.org as soon as possible. While the release is feature complete entering the beta phase, it is possible that features may be modified or, in rare cases, deleted up until the start of the release candidate phase (2016-12-05). Our goal is have no changes after rc1. To achieve that, it will be extremely important to get as much exposure for 3.6 as possible during the beta phase. Please keep in mind that this is a preview release and its use is not recommended for production environments The next pre-release of Python 3.6 will be 3.6.0rc1, the release candidate, currently scheduled for 2016-12-05. The official release of Python 3.6.0 is currently scheduled for 2016-12-16. More information about the release schedule can be found here: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0494/ -- Ned Deily nad@python.org -- []