On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 7:40 AM, harrismh777 <harrismh...@charter.net>wrote:
> Colin J. Williams wrote: > >> It would be safer to stick with Python 2.7 initially and then consider >> the transition to 3.2 later. >> > > I must disagree with Colin's statement. If you are a complete beginner with > Python... then there is going to a learning curve for you... and that curve > should be 3.2--- period. > I almost agree with this, but not quite: A newbie should start with 3.2, but regrettably fall back to 2.7 -=IF=- there's a necessary dependency that hasn't been updated for whatever project(s) they're working on. > > The point is that 3.x is completely incompatible with 2.x (some call it a > dialect, but that is a lie). Python3 is the future of the language, and if > you're new to Python, then learn 3.x, move forward and don't look back... > seriously. > 3.x and 2.x are not that extremely incompatible. You usually can't just take 2.x code and run it, unmodified, on 3.x. However, there is a common subset that is pretty viable. EG: http://stromberg.dnsalias.org/~dstromberg/backshift/ Backshift is a relatively substantial piece of code (4400 lines and counting), but it runs fine on CPython 2.x, CPython 3.x, PyPy and Jython (Jython just slightly post-2.5.2 - they aren't planning to cut a new release that's compatible, but it's in their SCM), without any help from 2to3 or 3to2. It was written from the start with the intent of being very portable.
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