Python Intro

Links	A guide to some basic features	Python container types
Index Python Wiki Tutorial Editors IDEs	A basic syntactic distinction Statements and Expressions Some basic data types Lists , Splicing example Strings tuples Dictionaries Python supertypes Mutable types Containers Look and feel Indentation expresses program block structure (An example, Discussion) Editors and Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) IDLE (packaged with Python) PythonWin Komodo Wing SPE PyDev/Eclipse IDEStudio IPython
	Why Python?
:	Stable Portable across many platforms and OSs Mature Lots of applications of different types Many platforms Portability claims tested Good for rapid prototyping Good for beginners Debugging facilities Extensions C, C++ (SWIG, SIP, PYCXX) Fortran (F2Py) Java (Jython)

Classifying Python

Interpreted (comes with a compiler AND interpreter)

Polymorphic

High-level (VHLL?)

No user burden of memory management

Undeclared variables OK (Dynamic typing)

Fewer Errors caught at compile time, more at run time

Excellent run time error handling (a strong point!) [It's hard to crash Python!]

Spare (but not minimalist)

Often one (best) way to say it! (Contra Perl!)

Object-oriented

Python classes and instances

Object-oriented programming is optional!

You can program in Python without thinking about classes

Competitors

Perl

Ruby

TCL (not as versatile as the others ?)

Some useful Python idioms and/or tools

Opening, reading, and writing to files

Comment

List comprehension

Very Pythonic idiom!

Zipping!

Regular expressions

Comment on item 2

Standard Unix scripting tools

Local and global variables in Python

When a variable is set in a function, it becomes local!

A summary example

Python pitfalls

Python gotchas

Python efficiency guide