About Python

Python is a general-purpose high-level programming language. Its design philosophy emphasizes programmer productivity and code readability. It has a minimalist core syntax with very few basic commands and simple semantics, but it also has a large and comprehensive standard library, including an Application Programming Interface (API)

to many of the underlying operating system (OS) functions. Python code, while minimalist, defines built-in objects such as linked lists (list), tuples (tuple), hash tables (dict), and arbitrarily long integers (long).

Python supports multiple programming paradigms, including object-oriented (class), imperative (def), and functional (lambda) programming. Python has a dynamic type system and automatic memory management using reference counting (similar to Perl, Ruby, and Scheme).

Python was first released by Guido van Rossum in 1991. The language has an open, community-based development model managed by the non-profit Python Software Foundation. There are many interpreters and compilers that implement the Python language, including one in Java (Jython) but, in this brief review, we refer to the reference C implementation created by Guido.

You can find many tutorials, the official documentation and library references of the language on the official Python website.[python]

For additional Python references, we can recommend the books in ref.[guido] and ref.[lutz] .

You may skip this chapter if you are already familiar with the Python language.