In this series looking at features introduced by every version of Python 3, we continue our look at Python 3.8, examining changes to the standard library. These include some useful new functionality in functools, some new mathematical functions in math and statistics, some improvements for running servers on dual-stack hosts in asyncio and socket, and also a number of new features in typing.

The fourth Python 3.x release brought another slew of great new features. So many, in fact, that I’ve split this release into two articles, of which this is the first. Highlights in this part include yield from expressions, mocking support in unittest and virtualenv suppport in the standard library.

This article continues to series looking at features added in each release of Python 3.x, with this one covering the move from 3.0 to 3.1. It includes the new contains OrderedDict and Counter, making modules executable as scripts, and marking unit tests as known failures. If you’re puzzled why I’m looking at releases that are years old, check out the first post in the series.

I was slow to make the transition from Python 2 to 3 in the first place, and I never felt like I kept up properly with the new features. So I’m going to aim to do a series of articles looking at a different Python version in each and go through the new features added and catch myself up properly. This one addresses features added in Python 3.0 beyond those already in 2.6, including Unicode by default, type annotations, and exception chaining.