What type of programming language is python?
Notice: While JavaScript is not essential for this website, your interaction with the content will be limited. Please turn JavaScript on for the full experience. Show
What is Python? Executive SummaryPython is an interpreted, object-oriented, high-level programming language with dynamic semantics. Its high-level built in data structures, combined with dynamic typing and dynamic binding, make it very attractive for Rapid Application Development, as well as for use as a scripting or glue language to connect existing components together. Python's simple, easy to learn syntax emphasizes readability and therefore reduces the cost of program maintenance. Python supports modules and packages, which encourages program modularity and code reuse. The Python interpreter and the extensive standard library are available in source or binary form without charge for all major platforms, and can be freely distributed. Often, programmers fall in love with Python because of the increased productivity it provides. Since there is no compilation step, the edit-test-debug cycle is incredibly fast. Debugging Python programs is easy: a bug or bad input will never cause a segmentation fault. Instead, when the interpreter discovers an error, it raises an exception. When the program doesn't catch the exception, the interpreter prints a stack trace. A source level debugger allows inspection of local and global variables, evaluation of arbitrary expressions, setting breakpoints, stepping through the code a line at a time, and so on. The debugger is written in Python itself, testifying to Python's introspective power. On the other hand, often the quickest way to debug a program is to add a few print statements to the source: the fast edit-test-debug cycle makes this simple approach very effective. See also some comparisons between Python and other languages. Python
Python is a high-level, general-purpose programming language. Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability with the use of significant indentation.[33] Python is dynamically-typed and garbage-collected. It supports multiple programming paradigms, including structured (particularly procedural), object-oriented and functional programming. It is often described as a "batteries included" language due to its comprehensive standard library.[34][35] Guido van Rossum began working on Python in the late 1980s as a successor to the ABC programming language and first released it in 1991 as Python 0.9.0.[36] 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.[37] Python consistently ranks as one of the most popular programming languages.[38][39][40][41] HistoryPython was conceived in the late 1980s[42] by Guido van Rossum at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in the Netherlands as a successor to the ABC programming language, which was inspired by SETL,[43] capable of exception handling and interfacing with the Amoeba operating system.[13] Its implementation began in December 1989.[44] Van Rossum shouldered sole responsibility for the project, as the lead developer, until 12 July 2018, when he announced his "permanent vacation" from his responsibilities as Python's "benevolent dictator for life", a title the Python community bestowed upon him to reflect his long-term commitment as the project's chief decision-maker.[45] In January 2019, active Python core developers elected a five-member Steering Council to lead the project.[46][47] Python 2.0 was released on 16 October 2000, with many major new
features.[48] Python 3.0, released on 3 December 2008, with many of its major features backported to Python 2.6.x[49] and 2.7.x. Releases of Python 3 include the Python 2.7's end-of-life was initially set for 2015, then postponed to 2020 out of concern that a large body of existing code could not easily be forward-ported to Python 3.[51][52] No further security patches or other improvements will be released for it.[53][54] With Python 2's end-of-life, only Python 3.6.x[55] and later were supported. Later, support for 3.6 was also discontinued. In 2021, Python 3.9.2 and 3.8.8 were expedited[56] as all versions of Python (including 2.7[57]) had security issues leading to possible remote code execution[58] and web cache poisoning.[59] In 2022, Python 3.10.4 and 3.9.12 were expedited[60] and so were older releases including 3.8.13, and 3.7.13 because of many security issues.[61] When Python 3.9.13 was released in May 2022, it was announced that the 3.9 series (joining the older series 3.8 and 3.7) will only receive security fixes going forward.[62] On September 7, 2022, four new releases were made due to a potential denial-of-service attack: 3.10.7, 3.9.14, 3.8.14, and 3.7.14.[63][64] Design philosophy and featuresPython is a multi-paradigm programming language. Object-oriented programming and structured programming are fully supported, and many of its features support functional programming and aspect-oriented programming (including metaprogramming[65] and metaobjects [magic methods] ).[66] Many other paradigms are supported via extensions, including design by contract[67][68] and logic programming.[69] Python uses dynamic typing and a combination of reference counting and a cycle-detecting garbage collector for memory management.[70] It uses dynamic name resolution (late binding), which binds method and variable names during program execution. Its design offers some support for functional programming in the Lisp tradition. It has Its core philosophy is summarized in the document The Zen of Python (PEP 20), which includes aphorisms such as:[73]
Rather than building all of its functionality into its core, Python was designed to be highly extensible via modules. This compact modularity has made it particularly popular as a means of adding programmable interfaces to existing applications. Van Rossum's vision of a small core language with a large standard library and easily extensible interpreter stemmed from his frustrations with ABC, which espoused the opposite approach.[42] Python strives for a simpler, less-cluttered syntax and grammar while giving developers a choice in their coding methodology. In contrast to Perl's "there is more than one way to do it" motto, Python embraces a "there should be one—and preferably only one—obvious way to do it" philosophy.[73] Alex Martelli, a Fellow at the Python Software Foundation and Python book author, wrote: "To describe something as 'clever' is not considered a compliment in the Python culture."[74] Python's developers strive to avoid premature optimization and reject patches to non-critical parts of the CPython reference implementation that would offer marginal increases in speed at the cost of clarity.[75] When speed is important, a Python programmer can move time-critical functions to extension modules written in languages such as C; or use PyPy, a just-in-time compiler. Cython is also available, which translates a Python script into C and makes direct C-level API calls into the Python interpreter. Python's developers aim for it to be fun to use. This is reflected in its name—a tribute to the British comedy group Monty Python[76]—and in occasionally playful approaches to tutorials and reference materials, such as examples that refer to spam and eggs (a reference to a Monty Python sketch) instead of the standard foo and bar.[77][78] The programming language's name 'Python' came from the BBC Comedy series Monty Python's Flying Circus. Guido van Rossum thought he needed a name that was short, unique and slightly mysterious, And so, he decided to name the programming language 'Python'.[76] A common neologism in the Python community is pythonic, which has a wide range of meanings related to program style. "Pythonic" code may use Python idioms well, be natural or show fluency in the language, or conform with Python's minimalist philosophy and emphasis on readability. Code that is difficult to understand or reads like a rough transcription from another programming language is called unpythonic.[79][80] Python users and admirers, especially those considered knowledgeable or experienced, are often referred to as Pythonistas.[81][82] Syntax and semanticsPython is meant to be an easily readable language. Its formatting is visually uncluttered and often uses English keywords where other languages use punctuation. Unlike many other languages, it does not use curly brackets to delimit blocks, and semicolons after statements are allowed but rarely used. It has fewer syntactic exceptions and special cases than C or Pascal.[83] IndentationPython uses whitespace indentation, rather than curly brackets or keywords, to delimit blocks. An increase in indentation comes after certain statements; a decrease in indentation signifies the end of the current block.[84] Thus, the program's visual structure accurately represents its semantic structure.[85] This feature is sometimes termed the off-side rule. Some other languages use indentation this way; but in most, indentation has no semantic meaning. The recommended indent size is four spaces.[86] Statements and control flowPython's statements include:
The assignment statement ( Python does not support tail call optimization or first-class continuations, and, according to van Rossum, it never will.[89][90] However, better support for coroutine-like functionality is provided by extending Python's generators.[91] Before 2.5, generators were lazy iterators; data was passed unidirectionally out of the generator. From Python 2.5 on, it is possible to pass data back into a generator function; and from version 3.3, it can be passed through multiple stack levels.[92] ExpressionsSome Python expressions are similar to those in languages such as C and Java, while some are not:
In Python, a distinction between expressions and statements is rigidly enforced, in contrast to languages such as Common Lisp, Scheme, or Ruby. This leads to duplicating some functionality. For example:
Statements
cannot be a part of an expression—so list and other comprehensions or lambda expressions, all being expressions, cannot contain statements. A particular case is that an assignment statement such as MethodsMethods on objects are functions attached to the object's class; the
syntax TypingThe standard type hierarchy in Python 3 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. Despite being dynamically typed, Python is strongly typed, forbidding operations that are not well-defined (for example, adding a number to a string) rather than silently attempting to make sense of them. Python allows programmers to define their own
types using classes, most often used for object-oriented programming. New instances of classes are constructed by calling the class (for
example, Before version 3.0, Python had two kinds of classes (both using the same syntax): old-style and new-style,[105] current Python versions only support the semantics new style. The long-term plan is to support gradual typing.[106] Python's syntax allows specifying static types, but they are not checked in the default implementation, CPython. An experimental optional static type-checker, mypy, supports compile-time type checking.[107] Summary of Python 3's built-in types
Arithmetic operationsPython has the usual symbols for arithmetic operators ( The division between integers produces floating-point results. The behavior of division has changed significantly over time:[112]
In Python terms, Rounding towards negative infinity, though different from most languages, adds
consistency. For instance, it means that the equation Python provides a Python allows boolean expressions with multiple equality relations in a manner that is consistent with general use in mathematics. For example, the expression Python uses arbitrary-precision arithmetic for all integer operations. The Due to Python's extensive mathematics library, and the third-party library NumPy that further extends the native capabilities, it is frequently used as a scientific scripting language to aid in problems such as numerical data processing and manipulation.[120][121] Programming examplesHello world program: Program to calculate the factorial of a positive integer: n = int(input('Type a number, and its factorial will be printed: ')) if n < 0: raise ValueError('You must enter a non-negative integer') factorial = 1 for i in range(2, n + 1): factorial *= i print(factorial) LibrariesPython's large standard library [122] provides tools suited to many tasks, and is commonly cited as one of its greatest strengths. For Internet-facing applications, many standard formats and protocols such as MIME and HTTP are supported. It includes modules for creating graphical user interfaces, connecting to relational databases, generating pseudorandom numbers, arithmetic with arbitrary-precision decimals,[123] manipulating regular expressions, and unit testing. Some parts of the standard library are covered by specifications—for example, the Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI) implementation As of June 2022, the Python Package Index (PyPI), the official repository for third-party Python software, contains over 380,000[125] packages with a wide range of functionality, including:
Development environmentsMost Python implementations (including CPython) include a read–eval–print loop (REPL), permitting them to function as a command line interpreter for which users enter statements sequentially and receive results immediately. Python also comes with an Integrated development environment (IDE) called IDLE, which is more beginner-oriented. Other shells, including IDLE and IPython, add further abilities such as improved auto-completion, session state retention and syntax highlighting. As well as standard desktop integrated development environments, there are Web browser-based IDEs, including SageMath, for developing science- and math-related programs; PythonAnywhere, a browser-based IDE and hosting environment; and Canopy IDE, a commercial IDE emphasizing scientific computing.[126] ImplementationsReference implementationCPython is the reference implementation of Python. It is written in C, meeting the C89 standard (Python 3.11 uses C11[127]) with several select C99 features (With later C versions out, it is considered outdated.[128][129] CPython includes its own C extensions, but third-party extensions are not limited to older C versions—e.g. they can be implemented with C11 or C++.[130][131]) It compiles Python programs into an intermediate bytecode[132] which is then executed by its virtual machine.[133] CPython is distributed with a large standard library written in a mixture of C and native Python, and is available for many platforms, including Windows (starting with Python 3.9, the Python installer deliberately fails to install on Windows 7 and 8;[134][135] Windows XP was supported until Python 3.5) and most modern Unix-like systems, including macOS (and Apple M1 Macs, since Python 3.9.1, with experimental installer) and unofficial support for e.g. VMS.[136] Platform portability was one of its earliest priorities.[137] (During Python 1 and 2 development, even OS/2 and Solaris were supported,[138] but support has since been dropped for many platforms.) Other implementations
Unsupported implementationsOther just-in-time Python compilers have been developed, but are now unsupported:
Cross-compilers to other languagesThere are several compilers to high-level object languages, with either unrestricted Python, a restricted subset of Python, or a language similar to Python as the source language:
Specialized:
Older projects (or not to be used with Python 3.x and latest syntax):
PerformancePerformance comparison of various Python implementations on a non-numerical (combinatorial) workload was presented at EuroSciPy '13.[162] Python's performance compared to other programming languages is also benchmarked by The Computer Language Benchmarks Game.[163] DevelopmentPython's development is conducted largely through the Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) process, the primary mechanism for proposing major new features, collecting community input on issues, and documenting Python design decisions.[164] Python coding style is covered in PEP 8.[165] Outstanding PEPs are reviewed and commented on by the Python community and the steering council.[164] Enhancement of the language corresponds with the development of the CPython reference implementation. The mailing list python-dev is the primary forum for the language's development. Specific issues are discussed in the Roundup bug tracker hosted at bugs.python.org.[166] Development originally took place on a self-hosted source-code repository running Mercurial, until Python moved to GitHub in January 2017.[167] CPython's public releases come in three types, distinguished by which part of the version number is incremented:
Many alpha, beta, and release-candidates are also released as previews and for testing before final releases. Although there is a rough schedule for each release, they are often delayed if the code is not ready. Python's development team monitors the state of the code by running the large unit test suite during development.[173] The major academic conference on Python is PyCon. There are also special Python mentoring programmes, such as Pyladies. Python 3.10 deprecated API documentation generatorsTools that can generate documentation for Python API include pydoc (available as part of the standard library), Sphinx, Pdoc and its forks, Doxygen and Graphviz, among others.[177] NamingPython's name is derived from the British comedy group Monty Python, whom Python creator Guido van Rossum enjoyed while developing the language. Monty Python references appear frequently in Python code and culture;[178] for example, the metasyntactic variables often used in Python literature are spam and eggs instead of the traditional foo and bar.[178][179] The official Python documentation also contains various references to Monty Python routines.[180][181] The prefix Py- is used to show that something is related to Python. Examples of the use of this prefix in names of Python applications or libraries include Pygame, a binding of SDL to Python (commonly used to create games); PyQt and PyGTK, which bind Qt and GTK to Python respectively; and PyPy, a Python implementation originally written in Python. PopularitySince 2003, Python has consistently ranked in the top ten most popular programming languages in the TIOBE Programming Community Index where, as of October 2021, it is the most popular language (ahead of Java, and C).[182] It was selected Programming Language of the Year (for "the highest rise in ratings in a year") in 2007, 2010, 2018, and 2020 (the only language to do so four times[183]).[184] An empirical study found that scripting languages, such as Python, are more productive than conventional languages, such as C and Java, for programming problems involving string manipulation and search in a dictionary, and determined that memory consumption was often "better than Java and not much worse than C or C++".[185] Large organizations that use Python include Wikipedia, Google,[186] Yahoo!,[187] CERN,[188] NASA,[189] Facebook,[190] Amazon, Instagram,[191] Spotify,[192] and some smaller entities like ILM[193] and ITA.[194] The social news networking site Reddit was written mostly in Python.[195] UsesPython can serve as a scripting language for web applications, e.g., via mod_wsgi for the Apache webserver.[196] With Web Server Gateway Interface, a standard API has evolved to facilitate these applications. Web frameworks like Django, Pylons, Pyramid, TurboGears, web2py, Tornado, Flask, Bottle, and Zope support developers in the design and maintenance of complex applications. Pyjs and IronPython can be used to develop the client-side of Ajax-based applications. SQLAlchemy can be used as a data mapper to a relational database. Twisted is a framework to program communications between computers, and is used (for example) by Dropbox. Libraries such as NumPy, SciPy, and Matplotlib allow the effective use of Python in scientific computing,[197][198] with specialized libraries such as Biopython and Astropy providing domain-specific functionality. SageMath is a computer algebra system with a notebook interface programmable in Python: its library covers many aspects of mathematics, including algebra, combinatorics, numerical mathematics, number theory, and calculus.[199] OpenCV has Python bindings with a rich set of features for computer vision and image processing.[200] Python is commonly used in artificial intelligence projects and machine learning projects with the help of libraries like TensorFlow, Keras, Pytorch, and Scikit-learn.[201][202][203][204] As a scripting language with a modular architecture, simple syntax, and rich text processing tools, Python is often used for natural language processing.[205] Python can also be used to create games, with libraries such as Pygame, which can make 2D games. Python has been successfully embedded in many software products as a scripting language, including in finite element method software such as Abaqus, 3D parametric modeler like FreeCAD, 3D animation packages such as 3ds Max, Blender, Cinema 4D, Lightwave, Houdini, Maya, modo, MotionBuilder, Softimage, the visual effects compositor Nuke, 2D imaging programs like GIMP,[206] Inkscape, Scribus and Paint Shop Pro,[207] and musical notation programs like scorewriter and capella. GNU Debugger uses Python as a pretty printer to show complex structures such as C++ containers. Esri promotes Python as the best choice for writing scripts in ArcGIS.[208] It has also been used in several video games,[209][210] and has been adopted as first of the three available programming languages in Google App Engine, the other two being Java and Go.[211] Many operating systems include Python as a standard component. It ships with most Linux distributions,[212] AmigaOS 4 (using Python 2.7), FreeBSD (as a package), NetBSD, and OpenBSD (as a package) and can be used from the command line (terminal). Many Linux distributions use installers written in Python: Ubuntu uses the Ubiquity installer, while Red Hat Linux and Fedora Linux use the Anaconda installer. Gentoo Linux uses Python in its package management system, Portage. Python is used extensively in the information security industry, including in exploit development.[213][214] Most of the Sugar software for the One Laptop per Child XO, now[when?] developed at Sugar Labs, is written in Python.[215] The Raspberry Pi single-board computer project has adopted Python as its main user-programming language. LibreOffice includes Python and intends to replace Java with Python. Its Python Scripting Provider is a core feature[216] since Version 4.0 from 7 February 2013. Languages influenced by PythonPython's design and philosophy have influenced many other programming languages:
Python's development practices have also been emulated by other languages. For example, the practice of requiring a document describing the rationale for, and issues surrounding, a change to the language (in Python, a PEP) is also used in Tcl,[226] Erlang,[227] and Swift.[228] See also
References
Sources
Further reading
External links
. Is Python a scripting or a programming language?Python is an interpreted language. Python uses an interpreter to translate and run its code. Hence Python is a scripting language.
Which type of programming does Python support?Python supports four main programming paradigms: imperative, functional, procedural, and object-oriented. Whether you agree that they are valid or even useful, Python strives to make all four available and working.
What type of language is Java and Python?Java is a statically typed and compiled language, and Python is a dynamically typed and interpreted language. This single difference makes Java faster at runtime and easier to debug, but Python is easier to use and easier to read.
What type of programming language is Python and how does it work?Python is a computer programming language often used to build websites and software, automate tasks, and conduct data analysis. Python is a general-purpose language, meaning it can be used to create a variety of different programs and isn't specialized for any specific problems.
|