python december python was released-- major update to the python language that breaks backwards compatibility with python in number of critical areas fairly complete survey of the changes made to python can be found in the "what' new in python document available at some sensethe first of this book can be viewed as the polar opposite of the "what' newdocument that isall of the material covered so far has focused on features that are shared by both python and python this includes all of the standard library modulesmajor language featuresand examples aside from few minor naming differences and the fact that print(is functionno unique python features have been described the main focus of this appendix is to describe new features to the python language that are only available in version as well as some important differences to keep in mind if you are going to migrate existing code at the end of this appendixsome porting strategies and use of the to code conversion tool is described who should be using python before going any furtherit is important to address the question of who should be using the python release within the python communityit has always been known that the transition to python would not happen overnight and that the python branch would continue to be maintained for some time (yearsinto the future soas of this writingthere is no urgent need to drop python code suspect that huge amounts of python code will continue to be in development when the th edition of this book is written years from now major problem facing python concerns the compatibility of third-party libraries much of python' power comes from its large variety of frameworks and libraries howeverunless these libraries are explicitly ported to python they are almost certain not to work this problem is amplified by the fact that many libraries depend upon other libraries that depend on yet more libraries as of this writing ( )there are major libraries and frameworks for python that haven' even been ported to python let alone or soif you are using python with the intention of running third-party codeyou are better off sticking with python for now if you've picked up this book and it' the year then hopefully the situation will have improved although python cleans up lot of minor warts in the languageit is unclear if python is currently wise choice for new users just trying to learn the basics almost all existing documentationtutorialscookbooksand examples assume python and use lib fl ff