DOC: Minimum Python Version?

[chrisyeh96]

Is there any minimum Python version required for ACN portal? Clearly, Python 3.6 is necessary for using f-strings. But ideally, if you target Python 3.7+, then you can simplify a lot of the typing annotations. For example, you can do things like the following in Python 3.7+:

from __future__ import annotations

def f(x: dict[str, int] | None = None) -> dict | None:
    return x

I didn't see any minimum Python version specified in the docs, so if that can be added (and ideally Python 3.7+), then I could help add appropriate typing annotations.

[sunash]

Hi @chrisyeh96, I'm okay with a 3.7 minimum version. I think it would probably need to be a new release, though. @zach401 what do you think?

I'm personally not familiar with future.annotations; are there any major functional differences between that and the typing package? Namely, I assume mypy allows either?

[chrisyeh96]

The __future__ package in the Python standard library contains experimental ideas, essentially for beta testing. It enables the following 3 main changes:

• you can directly use built-in Python types like list and dict in your typing annotations, without having to call from typing import List, Dict
• you can use str | None instead of writing from typing import Optional, then Optional[str]
• you can use str | dict instead of writing from typing import Union, then Union[str, dict]

In short, it just makes the typing annotations look cleaner. The benefits are purely cosmetic.

(There are actually a few other nontrivial situations where from __future__ import annotations actually helps with, but they are rare, and I won't explain them here.)