Python: the language of future

Python is an easy to learn, powerful programming language. It has efficient high-level data structures and a simple but effective approach to object-oriented programming.

 Python’s elegant syntax and dynamic typing, together with its interpreted nature, make it an ideal language for scripting and rapid application development in many areas on most platforms.

Python is an object-oriented language that was developed in the late 1980s(the name is derived from the British television series, Monty Python’s Flying Circus) by Guido van Rossum at Stichting Mathematisch Centrum in the Netherlands as a successor of a language called ABC . Guido remains Python’s principal author, although it includes many contributions from others. Python is well Known in programming community.

The Python interpreter and the extensive standard library are freely available in source or binary form for all major platforms from the Python Web site, http://www.python.org/, and may be freely distributed. The same site also contains distributions of and pointers to many free third party Python modules, programs and tools, and additional documentation.

The Python interpreter is easily extended with new functions and data types implemented in C or C++ (or other languages callable from C). Python is also suitable as an extension language for customizable applications.

Python is an interpreted language. The main advantage of an interpreted language is tha programs can be tested and debugged quickly. Python programs can be developed in a shorter time than any other equivalent languages.

Python is simple to use, but it is a real programming language, offering much more structure and support for large programs than shell scripts or batch files can offer. 

On the other hand, Python also offers much more error checking than C, and, being a very-high-level language, it has high-level data types built in, such as flexible arrays and dictionaries. Because of its more general data types Python is applicable to a much larger problem domain than Awk or even Perl, yet many things are at least as easy in Python as in those languages.

Python allows you to split your program into modules that can be reused in other Python programs. It comes with a large collection of standard modules that you can use as the basis of your programs — or as examples to start learning to program in Python. Some of these modules provide things like file I/O, system calls, sockets, and even interfaces to graphical user interface toolkits like Tk.

Python enables programs to be written compactly and readable. Programs written in Python are typically much shorter than equivalent C, C++, or Java programs, for several reasons:

• ·         the high-level data types allow you to express complex operations in a single statement;
• ·         statement grouping is done by indentation instead of beginning and ending brackets;
• ·         no variable or argument declarations are necessary.

 

Obtain Python

The Python interpreter can be downloaded from

http://www.python.org/getit

It normally comes with a nice code editor called Idle that allows you to run programs directly from the editor. If you use Linux, it is very likely that Python is already installed in your machine.

Module

A module is a file containing Python definitions and statements. Python comes with a library of standard modules, described in a separate document, the Python Library Reference.

A module can be loaded into a program by the statement

from module_name import*

Packages

Packages are a way of structuring Python’s module namespace by using “dotted module names”.

 For example, the module name A.B designates a sub module named B in a package named A. 

Just like the use of modules saves the authors of different modules from having to worry about each other’s global variable names, the use of dotted module names saves the authors of multi-module packages like NumPy or the Python Imaging Library from having to worry about each other’s module names.

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