What’s New in Python 2.7

Author:	A.M. Kuchling (amk at amk.ca)

This article explains the new features in Python 2.7. Python 2.7 was released on July 3, 2010.

Numeric handling has been improved in many ways, for both floating-point numbers and for the Decimal class. There are some useful additions to the standard library, such as a greatly enhanced unittest module, the argparse module for parsing command-line options, convenient OrderedDict and Counterclasses in the collections module, and many other improvements.

Python 2.7 is planned to be the last of the 2.x releases, so we worked on making it a good release for the long term. To help with porting to Python 3, several new features from the Python 3.x series have been included in 2.7.

This article doesn’t attempt to provide a complete specification of the new features, but instead provides a convenient overview. For full details, you should refer to the documentation for Python 2.7 at https://docs.python.org. If you want to understand the rationale for the design and implementation, refer to the PEP for a particular new feature or the issue on https://bugs.python.org in which a change was discussed. Whenever possible, “What’s New in Python” links to the bug/patch item for each change.