Python 2.4 release candidate 1 is out.

As usual, Andy Kuchling's What's New in Python document is the best place to start. Highlights for me are Generator Expressions and the Decimal Data Type. I've blogged about the first of these before - see my Generator Expressions post. And I've mentioned the need for a decimal type before, too. Great stuff.

Congratulations and thanks to Guido and the Python-dev team.

As to the controversial Decorators for Functions and Methods, the jury's still out. The syntax still looks a little odd to me, but the same could have been said of the syntax for Slicing and List Comprehensions at first, to name but two things. Time has taught me that these syntaxes are actually really good. Guido knows what he's doing. And there's no doubt that decorators can be useful - see Decorator for BindingConstants at compile time and Memoize Decorator with Timeout for examples.

Update November 30th: Python 2.4 final is out.