Working with Expressions
It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.
At one level, a programming language is a super-calculator with the ability to work with data. You can do arithmetic with numbers or manipulate text represented as strings. More than that, a language allows you to create functions that perform custom operations and even to create new structures for data.
In this chapter, we introduce the basics of Python and how it implements the programming features described in Chapter 1, Doing the Things That Coders Do. In subsequent chapters, we go into greater detail and expand upon these ideas.
Via a search of the web, I saw an estimate that Python is known and used by more than 8 million developers. It is an excellent modern language that has been built by dozens of open source coders over the last thirty years. [HPY]
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