Python Programming Overview

Study Notes

Python is a general-purpose programming language
Python was conceived in the late 1980s and first released in 1991
Python 2.0 was released in 2000 and introduced new features such as list comprehensions, cycle-detecting garbage collection, reference counting, and Unicode support
Python 3.0, released in 2008, was a major revision that is not completely backward-compatible with earlier versions
Python 2 was discontinued with version 2.7.18 in 2020
Python 3.11.0 is the current stable release
Several deprecated functions, classes, and methods have been removed from Python 3.12 (alpha 2)
Python is a multi-paradigm programming language, which means that it supports a variety of programming styles.
Python is known for its readability, and its syntax and formatting are designed to be visually uncluttered.
Python is also known for its minimalist philosophy, which emphasizes readability over features.
Python is popular for its extensibility, and its developers aim to keep the language as simple as possible.
Python has a number of idioms that make it easy to read and write code.
Python uses whitespace indentation to delimit blocks, rather than curly brackets or keywords.
An increase in indentation signifies the start of a new block and a decrease signifies the end of the current block.
Statements include: assignment statement (=), conditional statement (if/else), for loop, while loop, and try block.
Expressions include: expressions and methods.
Python has no support for tail call optimization or first-class continuations, but better support for coroutine-like functionality is provided by extending Python's generators.
Python uses duck typing and has typed objects but untyped variable names. Type constraints are not checked at compile time; rather, operations on an object may fail, signifying that it is not of a suitable type.
Python is a high-level, interpreted, general-purpose programming language.
It has a standard library that provides many tools for many tasks.
The language is easy to learn and use.
It is popular for scripting and web development.