The Python Language Reference

Release:3.1 Date:March 20, 2010

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.

• 1. Introduction
  • 1.1. Alternate Implementations
  • 1.2. Notation
• 2. Lexical analysis
  • 2.1. Line structure
  • 2.2. Other tokens
  • 2.3. Identifiers and keywords
  • 2.4. Literals
  • 2.5. Operators
  • 2.6. Delimiters
• 3. Data model
  • 3.1. Objects, values and types
  • 3.2. The standard type hierarchy
  • 3.3. Special method names
• 4. Execution model
  • 4.1. Naming and binding
  • 4.2. Exceptions
• 5. Expressions
  • 5.1. Arithmetic conversions
  • 5.2. Atoms
  • 5.3. Primaries
  • 5.4. The power operator
  • 5.5. Unary arithmetic and bitwise operations
  • 5.6. Binary arithmetic operations
  • 5.7. Shifting operations
  • 5.8. Binary bitwise operations
  • 5.9. Comparisons
  • 5.10. Boolean operations
  • 5.11. Lambdas
  • 5.12. Expression lists
  • 5.13. Evaluation order
  • 5.14. Summary
• 6. Simple statements
  • 6.1. Expression statements
  • 6.2. Assignment statements
  • 6.3. The assert statement
  • 6.4. The pass statement
  • 6.5. The del statement
  • 6.6. The return statement
  • 6.7. The yield statement
  • 6.8. The raise statement
  • 6.9. The break statement
  • 6.10. The continue statement
  • 6.11. The import statement
  • 6.12. The global statement
  • 6.13. The nonlocal statement
• 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. The with statement
  • 7.6. Function definitions
  • 7.7. Class definitions
• 8. Top-level components
  • 8.1. Complete Python programs
  • 8.2. File input
  • 8.3. Interactive input
  • 8.4. Expression input
• 9. Full Grammar specification