It features modules, classes, exceptions, very high level dynamic data types, and dynamic typing. There are interfaces to many system calls and libraries, as well as to various windowing systems (X11, Motif, Tk, Mac, MFC).

New built-in modules are easily written in C or C++. Python is also usable as an extension language for applications that need a programmable interface.

The Python implementation is portable: it runs on many brands of UNIX, on Windows, OS/2, Mac, Amiga, and many other platforms.

What's New in version 3.0:

Core and Builtins:

• Issue 3996: On Windows, the PyOS_CheckStack function would cause the interpreter to abort (Fatal Python error: Could not reset the stack!) instead of throwing a MemoryError.
• Issue 3689: The list reversed iterator now supports __length_hint__ instead of __len__. Behavior now matches other reversed iterators.
• Issue 4367: Python would segfault during compiling when the unicodedata module couldn't be imported and N escapes were present.
• Fix build failure of _cursesmodule.c building with -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2.

Library:

• Issue 4387: binascii now refuses to accept str as binary input.
• Issue 4073: Add 2to3 support to build_scripts, refactor that support in build_py.
• IDLE would print a Unhandled server exception! message when internal debugging is enabled.
• Issue 4455: IDLE failed to display the windows list when two windows have the same title.
• Issue 3741: DISTUTILS_USE_SDK set causes msvc9compiler.py to raise an exception.
• Issue 4433: Fixed an access violation when garbage collecting _ctypes.COMError instances.
• Issue 4429: Fixed UnicodeDecodeError in ctypes.
• Issue 4373: Corrected a potential reference leak in the pickle module and silenced a false positive ref leak in distutils.tests.test_build_ext.
• Issue 4382: dbm.dumb did not specify the expected file encoding for opened files.
• Issue 4383: When IDLE cannot make the connection to its subprocess, it would fail to properly display the error message.

Build:

• Issue 4407: Fix source file that caused the compileall step in Windows installer to fail.

Docs:

• Issue 4449: Fixed multiprocessing examples
• Issue 3799: Document that dbm.gnu and dbm.ndbm will accept string arguments for keys and values which will be converted to bytes before committal.