Release Date: Dec. 4, 2023

This is the seventh maintenance release of Python 3.11

Python 3.11.7 is the newest major release of the Python programming language, and it contains many new features and optimizations.

Major new features of the 3.11 series, compared to 3.10

Some of the new major new features and changes in Python 3.11 are:

General changes

• PEP 657 -- Include Fine-Grained Error Locations in Tracebacks
• PEP 654 -- Exception Groups and except*
• PEP 680 -- tomllib: Support for Parsing TOML in the Standard Library
• gh-90908 -- Introduce task groups to asyncio
• gh-34627 -- Atomic grouping ((?>...)) and possessive quantifiers (*+, ++, ?+, {m,n}+) are now supported in regular expressions.
• The Faster CPython Project is already yielding some exciting results. Python 3.11 is up to 10-60% faster than Python 3.10. On average, we measured a 1.22x speedup on the standard benchmark suite. See Faster CPython for details.

Typing and typing language changes

• PEP 673 -- Self Type
• PEP 646 -- Variadic Generics
• PEP 675 -- Arbitrary Literal String Type
• PEP 655 -- Marking individual TypedDict items as required or potentially-missing
• PEP 681 -- Data Class Transforms

More resources

• Online Documentation
• PEP 664, 3.11 Release Schedule
• Report bugs at https://github.com/python/cpython/issues.
• Help fund Python and its community.

And now for something completely different

A pentaquark is a human-made subatomic particle, consisting of four quarks and one antiquark bound together; they are not known to occur naturally, or exist outside of experiments specifically carried out to create them.

Quarks quarks have a baryon number of +1/3 and antiquarks of -1/3, the pentaquark would have a total baryon number of 1, and thus would be a baryon. Further, because it has five quarks instead of the usual three found in regular baryons (a.k.a. 'triquarks'), it is classified as an exotic baryon. The name pentaquark was coined by Claude Gignoux and Harry J. Lipkin in 1987; however, the possibility of five-quark particles was identified as early as 1964 when Murray Gell-Mann first postulated the existence of quarks. Although predicted for decades, pentaquarks proved surprisingly difficult to discover and some physicists were beginning to suspect that an unknown law of nature prevented their production.

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