Well, while you mention forward compatibility, there is also backwards compatibility. I am really a person that loves to move towards 3.x, but having a ton of u

Well, while you mention forward compatibility, there is also backwards compatibility. I am really a person that loves to move towards 3.x, but having a ton of users (some not technical enough to compile Python) with old Python installations (2.5.x or older) as default on their machines (CentOS for example is always an issue...) it is a double-edged sword since 2.6.0a2 is required to use Unicode literals and the print function [1]. I remember reading a long time ago that the fact that Python comes as default for many distributions may very well become a curse, I fear, that this may very well be true. [1]: http://docs.python.org/library/__future__.html http://docs.python.org/library/__future__.html