The Python Language Reference

Release:2.6 Date:October 02, 2008

This reference manual describes the syntax and “core semantics” of the language. It is terse, but attempts to be exact and complete. The semantics of non-essential built-in object types and of the built-in functions and modules are described in The Python Standard Library. For an informal introduction to the language, see The Python Tutorial. For C or C++ programmers, two additional manuals exist: Extending and Embedding the Python Interpreter describes the high-level picture of how to write a Python extension module, and the Python/C API Reference Manual describes the interfaces available to C/C++ programmers in detail.

• Introduction
  • Alternate Implementations
  • Notation

• Lexical analysis
  • Line structure
  • Other tokens
  • Identifiers and keywords
  • Literals
  • Operators
  • Delimiters

• Data model
  • Objects, values and types
  • The standard type hierarchy
  • New-style and classic classes
  • Special method names

• Execution model
  • Naming and binding
  • Exceptions

• Expressions
  • Arithmetic conversions
  • Atoms
  • Primaries
  • The power operator
  • Unary arithmetic operations
  • Binary arithmetic operations
  • Shifting operations
  • Binary bitwise operations
  • Comparisons
  • Boolean operations
  • Lambdas
  • Expression lists
  • Evaluation order
  • Summary

• Simple statements
  • Expression statements
  • Assignment statements
  • The assert statement
  • The pass statement
  • The del statement
  • The print statement
  • The return statement
  • The yield statement
  • The raise statement
  • The break statement
  • The continue statement
  • The import statement
  • The global statement
  • The exec statement

• Compound statements
  • The if statement
  • The while statement
  • The for statement
  • The try statement
  • The with statement
  • Function definitions
  • Class definitions

• Top-level components
  • Complete Python programs
  • File input
  • Interactive input
  • Expression input

• Full Grammar specification