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Python Tutorial
Python is a simple, easy to learn, powerful, high level and object-oriented programming
language.
Python is an interpreted scripting language also. Guido Van Rossum is known as the
founder of python programming.
Python is a general purpose, dynamic, high level and interpreted programming
language. It supports Object Oriented programming approach to develop applications. It
is simple and easy to learn and provides lots of high-level data structures.
Python Features
Python provides lots of features that are listed below.
1) Easy to Learn and Use
Python is easy to learn and use. It is developer-friendly and high level programming
language.
2) Expressive Language
Python language is more expressive means that it is more understandable and readable.
3) Interpreted Language
Python is an interpreted language i.e. interpreter executes the code line by line at a
time. This makes debugging easy and thus suitable for beginners.
4) Cross-platform Language
Python can run equally on different platforms such as Windows, Linux, Unix and
Macintosh etc. So, we can say that Python is a portable language.
5) Free and Open Source
Python language is freely available at offical web address.The source-code is also
available. Therefore it is open source.
6) Object-Oriented Language
Python supports object oriented language and concepts of classes and objects come into
existence.
7) Extensible
It implies that other languages such as C/C++ can be used to compile the code and thus
it can be used further in our python code.
8) Large Standard Library
Python has a large and broad library and prvides rich set of module and functions for
rapid application development.
9) GUI Programming Support
Graphical user interfaces can be developed using Python.
10) Integrated
It can be easily integrated with languages like C, C++, JAVA etc.
Python History and Versions
o Python laid its foundation in the late 1980s.
o The implementation of Python was started in the December 1989 by Guido Van
Rossum at CWI in Netherland.
o In February 1991, van Rossum published the code (labeled version 0.9.0) to
alt.sources.
o In 1994, Python 1.0 was released with new features like: lambda, map, filter, and
reduce.
o Python 2.0 added new features like: list comprehensions, garbage collection
system.
o On December 3, 2008, Python 3.0 (also called "Py3K") was released. It was
designed to rectify fundamental flaw of the language.
o ABC programming language is said to be the predecessor of Python language
which was capable of Exception Handling and interfacing with Amoeba Operating
System.
o Python is influenced by following programming languages:
o ABC language.
o Modula-3
Python Version List
Python programming language is being updated regularly with new features and
supports. There are lots of updations in python versions, started from 1994 to current
release.
A list of python versions with its released date is given below.
Python Version Released Date
Python 1.0 January 1994
Python 1.5 December 31, 1997
Python 1.6 September 5, 2000
Python 2.0 October 16, 2000
Python 2.1 April 17, 2001
Python 2.2 December 21, 2001
Python 2.3 July 29, 2003
Python 2.4 November 30, 2004
Python 2.5 September 19, 2006
Python 2.6 October 1, 2008
Python 2.7 July 3, 2010
Python 3.0 December 3, 2008
Python 3.1 June 27, 2009
Python 3.2 February 20, 2011
Python 3.3 September 29, 2012
Python 3.4 March 16, 2014
Python 3.5 September 13, 2015
Python 3.6 December 23, 2016
Python 3.7 June 27, 2018
Python Applications
Python is known for its general purpose nature that makes it applicable in almost each
domain of software development. Python as a whole can be used in any sphere of
development.
Here, we are specifing applications areas where python can be applied.
1) Web Applications
We can use Python to develop web applications. It provides libraries to handle internet
protocols such as HTML and XML, JSON, Email processing, request, beautifulSoup,
Feedparser etc. It also provides Frameworks such as Django, Pyramid, Flask etc to
design and delelop web based applications. Some important developments are:
PythonWikiEngines, Pocoo, PythonBlogSoftware etc.
2) Desktop GUI Applications
Python provides Tk GUI library to develop user interface in python based application.
Some other useful toolkits wxWidgets, Kivy, pyqt that are useable on several platforms.
The Kivy is popular for writing multitouch applications.
3) Software Development
Python is helpful for software development process. It works as a support language and
can be used for build control and management, testing etc.
4) Scientific and Numeric
Python is popular and widely used in scientific and numeric computing. Some useful
library and package are SciPy, Pandas, IPython etc. SciPy is group of packages of
engineering, science and mathematics.
5) Business Applications
Python is used to build Bussiness applications like ERP and e-commerce systems. Tryton
is a high level application platform.
6) Console Based Application
We can use Python to develop console based applications. For example: IPython.
7) Audio or Video based Applications
Python is awesome to perform multiple tasks and can be used to develop multimedia
applications. Some of real applications are: TimPlayer, cplay etc.
8) 3D CAD Applications
To create CAD application Fandango is a real application which provides full features of
CAD.
9) Enterprise Applications
Python can be used to create applications which can be used within an Enterprise or an
Organization. Some real time applications are: OpenErp, Tryton, Picalo etc.
10) Applications for Images
Using Python several application can be developed for image. Applications developed
are: VPython, Gogh, imgSeek etc.
There are several such applications which can be developed using Python
How to Install Python (Environment Set-up)
First Python Program
In this Section, we will discuss the basic syntax of python by using which, we will run a
simple program to print hello world on the console.
Python provides us the two ways to run a program:
o Using Interactive interpreter prompt
o Using a script file
Python Variables
o Variable is a name which is used to refer memory location. Variable also known
as identifier and used to hold value.
o In Python, we don't need to specify the type of variable because Python is a type
infer language and smart enough to get variable type.
o Variable names can be a group of both letters and digits, but they have to begin
with a letter or an underscore.
Multiple Assignment
Python allows us to assign a value to multiple variables in a single statement which is
also known as multiple assignment.
We can apply multiple assignments in two ways either by assigning a single value to
multiple variables or assigning multiple values to multiple variables. Lets see given
examples.
1. Assigning single value to multiple variables
Eg:
x=y=z=50
print iple
print y
print z
Assigning multiple values to multiple variables:
a,b,c=5,10,15
print(a)
print (b)
print(c)
Output:
>>>
5
10
15
>>>
Python Data Types
Variables can hold values of different data types. Python is a dynamically typed language
hence we need not define the type of the variable while declaring it. Python enables us
to check the type of the variable used in the program. Python provides us
the type() function which returns the type of the variable passed.
A=10
b="Hi Python"
c = 10.5
print(type(a));
print(type(b));
print(type(c))
Python supports 4 types of numeric data.
1. int (signed integers like 10, 2, 29, etc.)
2. long (long integers used for a higher range of values like 908090800L,
-0x1929292L, etc.)
3. float (float is used to store floating point numbers like 1.9, 9.902, 15.2, etc.)
4. complex (complex numbers like 2.14j, 2.0 + 2.3j, etc.)
String
The string can be defined as the sequence of characters represented in the quotation
marks. In python, we can use single, double, or triple quotes to define a string.
str1 = 'hello javatpoint' #string str1
str2 = ' how are you' #string str2
print (str1[0:2]) #printing first two character using slice operator
print (str1[4]) #printing 4th character of the string
print (str1*2) #printing the string twice
print (str1 + str2) #printing the concatenation of str1 and str2
Python Keywords
Python Keywords are special reserved words which convey a special meaning to the
compiler/interpreter. Each keyword have a special meaning and a specific operation.
These keywords can't be used as variable. Following is the List of Python Keywords.
True False None and as
asset def class continue break
else finally elif del except
global for if from import
raise try or return pass
nonlocal in not is lambda