What is the purpose of a virtual environment in Python development, and how would you set up and activate one?

A virtual environment is used to create an isolated environment for Python projects. This helps manage dependencies and package versions separately for each project. To set up and activate a virtual environment, you can use the following commands:

# Create a virtual environment
python -m venv myenv

# Activate the virtual environment
# On Windows:
myenv\Scripts\activate
# On macOS and Linux:
source myenv/bin/activate