In recent years, scripting languages are used more and more for developing web sites and web applications. Among the popular scripting languages is Python. If you are a Java developer and is looking to learn what Python is all about, this post is for you.
- Python is a general programming language invented by by Guido van Rossum back in 1990.
- It is a very high level, dynamic, objected oriented and cross-platform language.
- Described by one of the authors of the book “Python Cookbook” as a language with syntactic ease of Rexx, the semantic simplicity of Tcl, the intellectual rigor of Scheme, and the awesome power of Perl.
- Python is more than a language, it has a set of standard library and other extension modules. This is similar to Java language.
- There are two production-quality implementations: CPython and Jython. Python .NET is an experimental implementation.
- Python does not use braces or begin/end delimiters around blocks of statements. Indentation is the only way to indicate such blocks.
- Some of the interesting keywords are: lambda and yield.
- One of the built-in number objects is complex numbers.
- The built-in type None denotes a null object.
- Python is an OO language, but it doesn’t force you to use OO paradigm. It also support procedural programming paradigm with modules and functions.