Introduction to Python (by Ilan Schnell)

What is Python?

Python is an interpreted, interactive language.

Official site: http://www.python.org/

To get started read the tutorial by Guido van Rossum (creator of the Python programming language).

Multi-paradigm:

• Procedural

• Object-oriented

• Functional, see David Mertz or A.M. Kuchling

Comes with many modules for: XML parsing, operating on tree objects, compression, network programming, regular expressions, URL parsing, hash functions, ...

Since python is interpreted it is slow, however critical parts of a program can be implemented in C, using SWIG if you want.

Python is pre-installed on many Linux distributions, however python is platform independent.

Installation (as usual): ./configure; make; su; make install

My examples have been tested with Python 2.5 (current version).