Recent language additions
Every release of Python comes with it a lot of changes of different types. Almost every release of Python brings some new syntax elements. However, the majority of the changes are related to Python's standard library, the CPython interpreter, the Python API, and CPython's C API. Due to space limitations, it is impossible to cover all of these in this book. That is why we will focus just on new syntax features and new additions to the standard library.
In terms of the two latest versions of Python, we can distinguish four main syntax updates:
- Dictionary and merge update operators (added in Python 3.9)
- Assignment expressions (added in Python 3.8)
- Type hinting generics (added in Python 3.9)
- Positional-only arguments (added in Python 3.8)
These four features would best be described as quality-of-life improvements. They do not introduce any new programming paradigms, nor drastically change the way your code can...
