During learning python, I followed different sites & few books, following are some useful points I want to remember,
Python is a high-level, interpreted, interactive and object-oriented scripting language. Python was designed to be highly readable which uses English keywords frequently where as other languages use punctuation and it has fewer syntactical constructions than other languages.
Python is Interpreted: This means that it is processed at runtime by the interpreter and you do not need to compile your program before executing it. This is similar to PERL and PHP.
Python is Interactive: This means that you can actually sit at a Python prompt and interact with the interpreter directly to write your programs.
Python is Object-Oriented: This means that Python supports Object-Oriented style or technique of programming that encapsulates code within objects.
Some interesting features:
- Support for functional and structured programming methods as well as OOP.
- It can be used as a scripting language or can be compiled to byte-code for building large applications.
- Very high-level dynamic data types and supports dynamic type checking.
- Supports automatic garbage collection.
- It can be easily integrated with C, C++, COM, ActiveX, CORBA and Java.
Python Identifiers:
A Python identifier is a name used to identify a variable, function, class, module or other object. An identifier starts with a letter A to Z or a to z or an underscore (_) followed by zero or more letters, underscores and digits (0 to 9).Python does not allow punctuation characters such as @, $ and % within identifiers. Python is a case sensitive programming language. Thus, Manpower and manpower are two different identifiers in Python.
Here are following identifier naming convention for Python:
- Class names start with an uppercase letter and all other identifiers with a lowercase letter.
- Starting an identifier with a single leading underscore indicates by convention that the identifier is meant to be private.
- Starting an identifier with two leading underscores indicates a strongly private identifier.
- If the identifier also ends with two trailing underscores, the identifier is a language-defined special name.