[po]

The real advantage here is the release of Armin's u'' syntax addition proposal:

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0414/

In a nutshell, the 2.x version of declaring a unicode string is now valid (although redundant). From the PEP:

In many cases, Python 2 offered two ways of doing things for historical reasons. For example, inequality could be tested with both != and <> and integer literals could be specified with an optional L suffix. Such redundancies have been eliminated in Python 3, which reduces the overall size of the language and improves consistency across developers.

In the original Python 3 design (up to and including Python 3.2), the explicit prefix syntax for unicode literals was deemed to fall into this category, as it is completely unnecessary in Python 3. However, the difference between those other cases and unicode literals is that the unicode literal prefix is not redundant in Python 2 code: it is a programmatically significant distinction that needs to be preserved in some fashion to avoid losing information.

This version of python should see more uptake by 2.x developers as it is now easier to port.

[slurgfest]

Although it was a pain, it was manageable beforehand and in fact, if you need to support 3.1 or 3.2, you will still have to manage it a different way.

Many of the features detailed in the release list are more helpful in general. 'yield from' is actually really good if you are using generator based coroutines, the wide/narrow build thing addresses a long-time pain point, it will be great if namespace packages are actually fixed by now, and adoption of virtualenv into the core is a big deal!

[aroberge]

This would have made it so much easier to create a version of Crunchy that could run transparently using either Python 2.x and 3.x. However, as much as I applaude this change, there are others new features in 3.3 that are just as important imo.