Download Python 2.6

Python is an object-oriented programming language that can be used to develop simple to complex cross-platform applications. The developers of this programming language have released the final version of Python 2.6. The upcoming 3.0 series is not backwards compatible with the previous release branches because of the need to clean up the language from old code and fix some existing design flaws. Version 2.6 adds therefore, partial forward compatibility to the 2.x line so that programmers can more easily transition their applications to Python 3.0 by already supporting new functions. The complete list of changes for Python 2.6 can be found at this page be proofread and the changes compared to the second release candidate look like this:

What’s New in Python 2.6 Final

Core and Builtins:

• Issue #3967: Fixed a crash in the count() and find() methods of string-like objects, when the “start” parameter is a huge value.
• Issue #3965: Fixed a crash on Windows when open() is given an invalid filename or mode, and the filename is a unicode string.
• Bug #3951: Py_USING_MEMORY_DEBUGGER should not be enabled by default.

library:

• Issue #3965: Allow repeated calls to turtle.Screen, by making it a true singleton object.
• Issue #3895: It was possible to crash the interpreter when an external timer was used with cProfile that returned an object that could not be converted into a float.
• Issue #3950: Made turtle respect scale factors.
• Issue #3547: Fixed ctypes structures bitfields of varying integer sizes.
• Issue #3879: A regression in urllib.getproxies_enviroment was fixed.
• Issue #3863: Disabled a unit test of fork being called from a thread when running on platforms known to exhibit OS bugs when attempting that.

build:

• Bug #3989: Package the 2to3 script (as 2to3.py) in the Windows installer.
• Bug #3887: Package x64 version of CRT for AMD64 Windows binaries.