#python 3.8

So, python 3.8 has been around a while now, October 14th, 2019 to be accurate. But it is still not used across the board because most people don’t know about the feature-set it brings to the table.

Some of the contemporary features are as follows:

• The Walrus Operator (:=)

It’s called so because the operator symbol resembles a “walrus”.This operator is used to assign and return a value in the same expression. Generally the assignment and retrieval of a value took two statements, but python 3.8 has made it more convenient.

Lets look a few examples:

Simple Print:-

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While Loops:-

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• Simpler use of F strings

It is basically used for string replacement as can seen in the given example:

New:-

In Python 3.8 , you can use assignment operators.

New Specifier:

Using this specifier , you can print both the text as well as the value of the variable using only this simple syntax.

You can also add spaces after ‘=’ and use the format specifier.

• New Module importlib.metadata

Through this module, you can access information about installed packages in your pc on python.

• Positional Only Arguments

New parameter syntax ‘/’ is used . It is used to specify that some parameters must be specified positionally according  to function needs.

Here more than required positional arguments were given.

Here only ‘name’ is a positional only argument while ‘greet’ is a regular argument that is why in the third iteration the output gives an error.

• New Statistics Functions

Prod function -used to simply multiply numbers.

isqrt function- used to find only the integral value of a square root.

No modulus operator need be used.

Dist function- used to find the distance between the two points

Hypot function – used to find the length of a vector

statistics.fmean()– used to find the mean of float numbers

statistics.geometric_mean()- used to find the geometric mean of float numbers

statistics.multimode()- used to find most frequently occurring values

statistics.quantiles()- used to cut points for dividing data into n continuous intervals with equal probability.

• ‘Finally’ and ‘Continue’ statements

In python 3.7 , you cannot use the ‘continue’ keyword in a ‘finally’ clause, as shown below:

But now in the new version it is supported, the same code in the new shell:

• New Optimizations

Some new optimizations to reduce ‘run’ timings and reduce memory usage.

Saving memory on initializing lists.

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So, the real question is “Should you upgrade to version 3.8?”

Well  , if you want to try out the new features you should absolutely upgrade to it.

About moving your projects from ver- 3.7 to ver- 3.8, Django and anaconda have both made it easy to switch between multiple versions. So switch as you like.

Ultimately it comes to you , if you think you can utilize the interesting but subtle features , try it out . Otherwise Python version 3.6 has become the base and most libraries and packages can be used on it without much problem.

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These were some of the many features of this new version that I thought were easy to understand & interesting enough to share. For more detailed information check the python official web site: