The Complete Reference: Python | Python Programming Language | Reading Books

Описание: Python has a long history--- noticeably longer than most people probably realize. In the year 2000, the Python development efforts underwent a great deal of reorganization as Guido van Rossum, the designer and primary developer of Python, and the rest of the Python team (including Tim Peters, Barry Warsaw, Jeremy Hylton, and Fred Drake) moved the development efforts first from CNRI (Centre for National Research Initiatives) to BeOpen, and ultimately, to Digital Creations.
Python Up to 1.5.2
Up until September 5, 2000, Python was developed and released through a public license supported by CNRI. Python 1.5.2 contained most of the functionality of Python that we are familiar with today. The final 1.5.2 release was released on April 13, 1999.
Python 1.6 (September 2000)
In September 2000, after Guido left CNRI, two versions of Python 1.6 were released. The first version came from CNRI and was their last official release of the Python language. Python 1.6b1, the beta version of the language, had been in development and testing for some time, so it was not a complete surprise to see Python 1.6b1 released by Guido Van Rossum and the BeOpen development team.
Version 1.6 included some minor improvements, including a change in the way list objects worked and some improvements in the socket and string-to-number conversion tools.
Python 2.0 (September 5, 2000)
Within 24 hours of CNRI’s announcement, Guido and the rest of the development team released version 2.0b1 (a beta release) of Python to steal a coup from CNRI’s 1.6 release. The entire Python team had moved from CNRI to the BeOpen initiative(www.beopen.com) on May 5, 2000 to continue the development of Python outside of CNRI and under an open-source agreement.
Version 2.0 included some important updates to Version 1.6, including new operators, new list syntax, and better module-importing methods. Version 2.0 also included one of the most significant updates to the standard Python library for more than a year, fixing numerous bugs and adding several new features and an entirely rewrittien suite of XML tools. The final version of Python2.0 was released on October 16, 2000.
Aside from the obvious language improvements, the move the BeOpen also enabled the development team to make other improvements for Python behind the scenes, such as moving the Python sources to SourceForge (www.sourceforge.net), and executing the final stages for moving JPython, the old Java-based Python interpreter, to the new Jython, hybrid.
Python 2.0 (October 28, 2000)
On October 28, 2000, Guido announced on the newsgroups and the main Python web site that the Python team had moved again, this time to Digital Creations. Digital Creations are the people behind Zope (Z-Objects Publishing Environment), one of the best-Known Python projects.
Python 3000
No further releases have come out since the Python 2.0 release from BeOpen, but work is planned for the new Python 3000 product, due to be released sometime in 2002.
Hopefully, given Digital Creations’ existing Python evangelism, there shouldn’t be any further moves for the Python team. Python 3000 itself is expected to be a major update of the language, in much the same way that Perl 6.0 is expected to be a major update to Perl 5.6. Python 3000 is unlikely to be the final name of the new version of Python; it’s just a code name for the new version.