Python Reference Manual

Guido van Rossum
Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI)
1895 Preston White Drive, Reston, Va 20191, USA
E-mail: guido@cnri.reston.va.us, guido@python.org
October 25, 1996
Release 1.4

Table of Contents

Python Reference Manual
Chapter 1: Introduction
1.1 Notation

Chapter 2: Lexical analysis
2.1 Line structure
2.1.1 Logical lines
2.1.2 Physical lines
2.1.3 Comments
2.1.4 Explicit line joining
2.1.5 Implicit line joining
2.1.6 Blank lines
2.1.7 Indentation
2.1.8 Whitespace between tokens
2.2 Other tokens
2.3 Identifiers and keywords
2.3.1 Keywords
2.3.2 Reserved classes of identifiers
2.4 Literals
2.4.1 String literals
2.4.1.1 String literal concatenation
2.4.2 Numeric literals
2.4.2.1 Integer and long integer literals
2.4.2.2 Floating point literals
2.4.2.3 Imaginary literals

2.5 Operators
2.6 Delimiters

Chapter 3: Data model
3.1 Objects, values and types
3.2 The standard type hierarchy
3.3 Special method names
3.3.1 Basic customization
3.3.2 Customizing attribute access
3.3.3 Emulating callable objects
3.3.4 Emulating sequence and mapping types
3.3.4.1 Additional methods for emulation of sequence types
3.3.5 Emulating numeric types

Chapter 4: Execution model
4.1 Code blocks, execution frames, and name spaces
4.2 Exceptions

Chapter 5: Expressions
5.1 Arithmetic conversions
5.2 Atoms
5.2.1 Identifiers (Names)
5.2.2 Literals
5.2.3 Parenthesized forms
5.2.4 List displays
5.2.5 Dictionary displays
5.2.6 String conversions
5.3 Primaries
5.3.1 Attribute references
5.3.2 Subscriptions
5.3.3 Slicings
5.3.4 Calls
5.4 The power operator
5.5 Unary arithmetic operations
5.6 Binary arithmetic operations
5.7 Shifting operations
5.8 Binary bit-wise operations
5.9 Comparisons
5.10 Boolean operations
5.11 Expression lists
5.12 Summary

Chapter 6: Simple statements
6.1 Expression statements
6.2 Assignment statements
6.3 The pass statement
6.4 The del statement
6.5 The print statement
6.6 The return statement
6.7 The raise statement
6.8 The break statement
6.9 The continue statement
6.10 The import statement
6.11 The global statement
6.12 The exec statement

Chapter 7: Compound statements
7.1 The if statement
7.2 The while statement
7.3 The for statement
7.4 The try statement
7.5 Function definitions
7.6 Class definitions

Chapter 8: Top-level components
8.1 Complete Python programs
8.2 File input
8.3 Interactive input
8.4 Expression input