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Python 3.7 Goes Live, 3.6 Gets Maintenance Update

This week the open source community that develops the Python language, often used for machine learning projects (as well as many others), announced that a new version -- Python 3.7.0 -- has been released.

Python 3.7 offers developers a host of new features, including:

  • A new way to declare data classes (PEP 557)
  • Adding breakpoint () to the built-in functions list (PEP 553)
  • New library modules including contextvars with new C APIs to give support for context variables (PEP 567), and dataclasses (PEP 557) for declaring data classes, plus importlib.resources.
  • -X dev, a new development runtime mode for CPython
  • A move away from ASCII for default text encoding in CPython.
  • Significant changes and improvements to asyncio, the concurrency module that was introduced in Python 3.4

As well as many more. A complete list can be found here.

Also this week, Python 3.6.6. was released. Version 3.6.6. is an update of Python 3.6. Some of the new features in this update include simpler customization of class creation, literal string formatting and preserving keyword augment order. A complete list of changes can be found here.

Version 3.6 of Python will be supported by the community with bug fixes through 2018 and security fixes through 2021, the community announcement states.

Interested developers can find out more about participating in the Python community here.

About the Author

Becky Nagel is the vice president of Web & Digital Strategy for 1105's Converge360 Group, where she oversees the front-end Web team and deals with all aspects of digital projects at the company, including launching and running the group's popular virtual summit and Coffee talk series . She an experienced tech journalist (20 years), and before her current position, was the editorial director of the group's sites. A few years ago she gave a talk at a leading technical publishers conference about how changes in Web browser technology would impact online advertising for publishers. Follow her on twitter @beckynagel.

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