Python Syntax compared to other programming languages
- Python was designed to for readability, and has some similarities to the English language with influence from mathematics.
- Python uses new lines to complete a command, as opposed to other programming languages which often use semicolons or parentheses.
- Python relies on indentation, using whitespace, to define scope; such as the scope of loops, functions and classes. Other programming languages often use curly-brackets for this purpose.
Where in other programming languages the indentation in code is for readability only, in Python the indentation is very important.
Python uses indentation to indicate a block of code.
if 5 > 2:
print("Five is greater than two!")Python will give you an error if you skip the indentation.
Python has commenting capability for the purpose of in-code documentation.
Comments start with a #, and Python will render the rest of the line as a comment:
#This is a comment.
print("Hello, World!")Python also has extended documentation capability, called docstrings.
Docstrings can be one line, or multiline. Docstrings are also comments:
Python uses triple quotes at the beginning and end of the docstring:
"""This is a
multiline docstring."""
print("Hello, World!")