Guido has retired as BDFL

PEP 401 says it all: Guido has retired. If you attended PyCon you heard Guido's keynote where he mentioned he was tired but not retiring. Well, "tired" turned to "retired" rather quickly once the sprints started.

To replace him as BDFL is Barry Warsaw, Friendly Language Uncle For Life (FLUFL). Read the PEP for details, but the things on the FLUFL's agenda is:

• Switch to bzr over hg.
• Move to '<>' over '!='.
• Back to 'print' as a statement.
• Shut down 3.x and backport everything to 2.7.
• Move over to Parrot as the VM for Python.
• Disband the PSF.

To help with the transition I have implemented a new future statement to make the diamond operator -- '<>' -- the one true way to write NOTEQUAL over '!=':


from __future__ import barry_as_FLUFL

This has been checked into Python 3.1.