• Literals
• Variables and identifiers
• Operators
• Expressions
• Data types

cats

• literal: a sequence of one or more characters that stands for itself.
• numeric literal: contains only the digits 0–9, a sign character (1 or 2) and a optional decimal point.
  • integer versus floating point value
  • e for scientific notation
  • 3, -42, +98.6, 6.033e23

• Floating point values have limited range and precision.
• IEEE 754: ±10^-308 to ±10³⁰⁸ with 16 to 17 digits of precision.
• arithmetic overflow: results when operation causes number to be “too big”.

>>> 1.5e200 * 2.0e210
inf

• arithmetic underflow: results when operation causes number to be “too small”.

>>> 1.0e-300 / 1.0e100
0.0

• Limited precision means actual values are approximations.

>>> 6 * 1/10
0.6
>>> 6 * (1/10)
0.6000000000000001

• format() produces a string version of a value with a specific number of decimal places.
• format specifier says how many places and format.

>>> 12/5
2.4
>>> format(12/5, '.2f')      # 2 places, floating point
'2.40'
>>> format(2 ** 100, '.6e')  # 6 places, scientific notation
'1.267651e 1 30'
>>> format(13402.25, ',.2f') # optional comma
'13,402.25'

• Use either single-quote or double-quote.

greeting = 'Hi there'
"Vernacular nepotism is fractious."
'A'
"A"

• Clever use:

msg = 'She said, "Yellow."'
msg = "She's making a radio."

• Characters need to be encoded as (binary) numbers.
• Python uses UTF-8 by default.
• ord() translates a single character into its UTF-8 code.
• chr() converts a UTF-8 code into a character.

>>> ord('1')
49
>>> ord('2')
50
>>> ord('a')
97
>>> ord('A')
65

• control characters: non-printing characters used to control display of output.
• Represented with escape sequences (backslash in Python).
• Most popular escape sequence is the newline control: '\n'.

>>> print('Eat\nMore\nElderberries')
Eat
More
Elderberries

• Format strings with format( value, format_specifier )

format('Hello', '<16')  # left aligned field 16 characters wide
'Hello           '
 
format('Hello', '>16')  # right aligned field 16 characters wide
'           Hello'
 
format('Hello', '.>16') # fill with '.'
'...........Hello'

• What to do with long lines in source code?
• implicit joining: you can break the line at some points without messing up logic or syntax.

print('Name:', student_name, 'Address:', student_address,
      'Number of Credits:', total_credits, 'GPA:', current_gpa)

• Doesn’t work to break up a string.

• explicit joining (backslash) can be used in some situations where implicit joining won’t.

num_seconds = num_hours * 60 * 60 + \
              num_minutes * 60 

• Also doesn’t work to break up strings.

# This program displays the Unicode encoding for 'Hello World!
 
# program greeting
print('The Unicode encoding for "Hello World!" is:')
 
# output results
print(ord('H'), ord('e'), ord('l'), ord('l'), ord('o'), ord(' '),
      ord('W'), ord('o'), ord('r'), ord('l'), ord('d'), ord('!'))