Python is a general purpose, high-level, interpreted programming language developed by Guido van Rossum in the late 1980s at the National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in the Netherlands.
Python is one of the most popular and widely used programming language used for set of tasks including console based, GUI based, web programming and data analysis.
Python is a easy to learn and simple programming language so even if you are new to programming, you can learn python without facing any problems.
Fact: Python is named after the comedy television show Monty Python's Flying Circus.
Python provides lots of features that are listed below.
Python is easy to learn and use compared with other programming languages. It is developer-friendly and high level programming language.
Python is an interpreted language because no need of compilation. This makes debugging easy and thus suitable for beginners.
Python can run equally on different platforms such as Windows, Linux, Unix and Macintosh etc. So, we can say that Python is a portable language.
The Python interpreter is developed under an open-source license, making it free to install, use, and distribute.
Python supports object oriented language and concepts of classes and objects come into existence.
Graphical user interfaces can be developed using Python.
It can be easily integrated with languages like C, C++, and JAVA etc.
Python is a general purpose programming language that makes it applicable in almost all domains of software development. Python as a whole can be used to develop any type of applications.
Here, we are providing some specific application areas where python can be applied.
To start programming with python, we have to know some more information. I.e, installation of python software and execution procedure of python program or script.
There are two major Python versions, those are Python 2 and Python 3. Python 2 and 3 are quite different. This tutorial uses Python 3, because it more semantically correct and supports newer features.
For installation of python software procedure go through ✍ Python Installation Tutorial
After successful installation of python software we can able interpret or execute python script / program.
Python provides us the two ways to run a python script:
Python provides us the feature to execute the python statement one by one at the interactive
prompt. It is preferable in the case where we are concerned about the output of each line of our python
program.
To open the interactive mode, open the terminal (or command prompt) and type python
(python3 in case if you have python2 and python3 both installed on your system).
Through Command Prompt :
(or)
In windows, search for python IDLE in all programs and then click on python IDLE, then the python interpreter prompt will open.
The Python interpreter prompt look like this
Interpreter prompt is good to run the individual statements of the code. However if we want to execute multiple python statements at a time instead of executing one by one, then we can use script file.
We need to write our script into a file which can be executed later. For this purpose, open an editor like notepad, create a file named filename.py (python used .py extension) and write the python script in it.
print("Hello !")
print("Welcome to Python Programming")
Hello !
Welcome to Python Programming