You could transform your 2.x code so that it would run on both 3.x python and also on recent 2.x python versions, using new features with appropriate `from __future__ import` statements; so in that regard the latest 2.x versions were those intermediate releases that could also run 'new style' code. I had a bunch of internal code that would run on both 2.x and 3.x python, and many libraries also did just that.