Python

Revision as of 04:25, 8 December 2012

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.

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

.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.