Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
A snippet of Python code with keywords highlighted in bold yellow font. The syntax of the Python programming language is the set of rules that defines how a Python program will be written and interpreted (by both the runtime system and by human readers). The Python language has many similarities to Perl, C, and Java. However, there are some ...
A statement terminator defines the end of an individual statement. Languages that interpret the end of line to be the end of a statement are called "line-oriented" languages. "Line continuation" is a convention in line-oriented languages where the newline character could potentially be misinterpreted as a statement terminator.
Another alternative is for each block to begin and end with explicit keywords. For example, in ALGOL 60 and its descendant Pascal , blocks start with keyword begin and end with keyword end . In some languages (but not Pascal), this means that newlines are important [ citation needed ] (unlike in curly brace languages), but the indentation is not.
In Python, if a name is intended to be "private", it is prefixed by one or two underscores. Private variables are enforced in Python only by convention. Names can also be suffixed with an underscore to prevent conflict with Python keywords. Prefixing with double underscores changes behaviour in classes with regard to name mangling.
The term closure is often used as a synonym for anonymous function, though strictly, an anonymous function is a function literal without a name, while a closure is an instance of a function, a value, whose non-local variables have been bound either to values or to storage locations (depending on the language; see the lexical environment section below).
Since 7 October 2024, Python 3.13 is the latest stable release, and it and, for few more months, 3.12 are the only releases with active support including for bug fixes (as opposed to just for security) and Python 3.9, [55] is the oldest supported version of Python (albeit in the 'security support' phase), due to Python 3.8 reaching end-of-life.
Early BASICs (such as GW-BASIC) used the syntax WHILE/WEND.Modern BASICs such as PowerBASIC provide both WHILE/WEND and DO/LOOP structures, with syntax such as DO WHILE/LOOP, DO UNTIL/LOOP, DO/LOOP WHILE, DO/LOOP UNTIL, and DO/LOOP (without outer testing, but with a conditional EXIT LOOP somewhere inside the loop).
Parse tree of Python code with inset tokenization. The syntax of textual programming languages is usually defined using a combination of regular expressions (for lexical structure) and Backus–Naur form (a metalanguage for grammatical structure) to inductively specify syntactic categories (nonterminal) and terminal symbols. [7]