Python Basics

Python is a high-level, dynamically typed multiparadigm programming language. Python code is often said to be almost like pseudocode, since it allows you to express very powerful ideas in very few lines of code while being very readable. As an example, here is an implementation of the classic quicksort algorithm in Python:

def quicksort(arr):
    if len(arr) <= 1:
        return arr
    pivot = arr[len(arr) // 2]
    left = [x for x in arr if x < pivot]
    middle = [x for x in arr if x == pivot]
    right = [x for x in arr if x > pivot]
    return quicksort(left) + middle + quicksort(right)

print(quicksort([3,6,8,10,1,2,1]))
# Prints "[1, 1, 2, 3, 6, 8, 10]"

Basic data types

Like most languages, Python has a number of basic types including integers, floats, booleans, and strings. These data types behave in ways that are familiar from other programming languages. Numbers: Integers and floats work as you would expect from other languages:

x = 3
print(type(x)) # Prints "<class 'int'>"
print(x)       # Prints "3"
print(x + 1)   # Addition; prints "4"
print(x - 1)   # Subtraction; prints "2"
print(x * 2)   # Multiplication; prints "6"
print(x ** 2)  # Exponentiation; prints "9"
x += 1
print(x)  # Prints "4"
x *= 2
print(x)  # Prints "8"
y = 2.5
print(type(y)) # Prints "<class 'float'>"
print(y, y + 1, y * 2, y ** 2) # Prints "2.5 3.5 5.0 6.25"

Note that unlike many languages, Python does not have unary increment (x++) or decrement (x--) operators. Python also has built-in types for complex numbers; you can find all of the details in the documentation. Booleans: Python implements all of the usual operators for Boolean logic, but uses English words rather than symbols (&&, ||, etc.):

t = True
f = False
print(type(t)) # Prints "<class 'bool'>"
print(t and f) # Logical AND; prints "False"
print(t or f)  # Logical OR; prints "True"
print(not t)   # Logical NOT; prints "False"
print(t != f)  # Logical XOR; prints "True"

Strings: Python has great support for strings:

hello = 'hello'    # String literals can use single quotes
world = "world"    # or double quotes; it does not matter.
print(hello)       # Prints "hello"
print(len(hello))  # String length; prints "5"
hw = hello + ' ' + world  # String concatenation
print(hw)  # prints "hello world"
hw12 = '%s %s %d' % (hello, world, 12)  # sprintf style string formatting
print(hw12)  # prints "hello world 12"