Its purpose is to help scientific programmers used to interpreted languages (such as MATLAB or IDL) or compiled languages (C/C++ or Fortran) to switch to Python. For ZIP and GZIP formats 7-Zip provides compression ratio that is 2-10 % better than ratio provided by PKZip and WinZip.
Supported formats: Packing / unpacking: 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR Unpacking only: ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, DEB, DMG, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MSI, NSIS, RAR, RPM, UDF, WIM, XAR and Z. The main features of 7-Zip: High compression ratio in new 7z format with LZMA compression. Whereas in Python 3, the zip() is reimplemented to return an iterator.
Also, an empty zip() call would get you an empty list. In Python 2, it used to return a list of tuples of the size equal to the shortest of the input iterables. The zip() function has got a slight change in the behavior in Python 3.