2.4 Variables and assignment
If we wanted to assign a reusable name to the list of ages, what might be
suitable? Well, “ages” starts with “a”, so we could use “a
”. However, that’s not
very descriptive. What if we also had a list of kinds of apples? Or the names of your aunts? A
good and descriptive name is ages
itself. We make the association between the name
and the data using an equal sign “=
”.
ages = [12, 16, 19]
This is an assignment, and ages
is a variable.
The name of the variable is an example of an identifier. We assign the value
[12, 16, 19]
to the variable ages
. Python produces no output from an
assignment.
If we type the variable name into the Python interpreter, we get the list we assigned to it.
ages
[12, 16, 19]
We compute the number of elements in the list using the Python built-in len function. [PYB...