Python

Revision as of 04:23, 10 January 2014

Python is a programming language.

It is one of the possibilities for the P in LAMP (a set of technologies used in many web back-ends, including Linux, Apache, and MySQL, notable for being free, open-source software in contrast to proprietary technologies such as those from Microsoft) along with Perl and PHP.

Media reports of python-linked deaths have nothing to do with the safety of this language, honest!

A notable feature of Python is its use of whitespace as a syntactically-significant part of its structure; the level of indenting of code blocks actually determines its place structurally, in contrast to most other languages which use explicit items such as curly braces or keywords such as Pascal's begin and end (though in those languages it is still customary to indent code blocks for readability).

It has a number of file endings associated with it, including .py, .pyc, .pyo, and .pyd. When people have desired a MIME type for Python code, they run into the fact that no standard has been established, and even the nonstandard types don't seem to have reached any degree of consistency; people have tried text/python, text/python3, application/python, text/x-python, and others.

.py

A text file that contains python source code. It is often utf-8 encoded, but it does not have to be.

.pyc

Compiled bytecode of a python source file

.pyo

Optimized compiled bytecode

.pyd

A python version of a Windows .dll file

Python is often affiliated with reStructuredText documents. Python comments are often formatted with reStructuredText markup.

References

• Python (Wikipedia)
• Official website
• Python trademark filer ignorant of Python?
• Python script to create 'Tweet this' link that doesn't require JavaScript
• PEP 8: Style guide for Python code
• Python interface to archive.org
• Python script to generate GIFs from Star Wars based on input dialogue line
• Brython: Python implemented in JavaScript