Changes in Python 3.10
Now, with the release of Python 3.10, the Python programming language has become even more powerful and versatile. In this short article for developers, we’ll take a look at some of the new features and improvements included in this latest release, including changes to regular expressions and pattern matching, the strict argument for the zip function, and improved error messages.
Structural pattern matching in Python 3.10
Python is known for its power with regular expressions, regex, and pattern matching. This capability is one of the changes in the new version of the language. In Python 3.10, structural pattern matching lets developers match variables against other sets of values. This is done using the newly added match-case statement.
Here's an example of how wi4orks works in Python 3.10 code:
match name:
case "Ivan":
print("Not the right name.")
case "Peter":
print("No, still not right.")
case "Mary":
print("Wrong, try again.")
case _:
print("Name not found.")
Enclosing a context manager in parentheses
Python 3.10 lets you format long sets of context managers across multiple lines. To do this, simply enclose the context managers in parentheses when using the with statement.
Improved error messages
Another important change in Python 3.10 is improved error messages. Python developers may know that sometimes error messages can be rather vague and not very helpful when trying to figure out what error actually occurred, or even which line it’s on.
Python 3.10 aims to improve this by providing more precise and informative error messages, including an indication of exactly where the error occurred. Considering how much time developers and programmers spend debugging code, this is a huge improvement for Python developers.
To see this in action, consider the following code and the error message you’ll get if you run it in a code editor or integrated development environment (IDE):
This code will produce the following error message:
File "/home/python/errorExample.py", line 1
print("My name is Dmitry Ivanov and this is my error!))
^
SyntaxError: EOL while scanning string literal
Deprecated in Python 3.10
As is usually the case with major programming language updates, Python 3.10 also has a number of deprecated features. First, OpenSSL versions older than version 1.1.1 are no longer supported. This change affects all modules, including hashlib, hmac, and ssl. In addition, the distutils package is deprecated; it will be officially removed in Python 3.12.
