A value is one of the basic things a program works with, like a letter or a number. The values we have seen so far are 1, 2, and 'Hello, World!'.
These values belong to different types: 2 is an integer, and 'Hello, World!' is a string, so-called because it contains a “string” of letters. You (and the interpreter) can identify strings because they are enclosed in quotation marks.
The print statement also works for integers.
>>> print(4)
4
If you are not sure what type a value has, the interpreter can tell you.
>>> type('hello, world')
<class 'str'>
>>> type (4)
<class 'int'>
>>> type ('17')
<class 'str'>
Not surprisingly, strings belong to the type str and integers belong to the type int. Less obviously, numbers with a decimal point belong to a type called float, because these numbers are represented in a format called floating-point.
>>> type(3.2)
<class 'float'>
What about values like '17' and '3.2'? They look like numbers, but they are in quotation marks
like strings.
>>> type('17')
<class 'str'>
>>> type('3.2')
<class 'str'>
They’re strings.
When you type a large integer, you might be tempted to use commas between groups of three digits, as in 1,000,000. This is not a legal integer in Python, but it is legal:
>>> print (1,000,000)
1 0 0
Well, that’s not what we expected at all! Python interprets 1,000,000 as a comma-separated se-quence of integers, which it prints with spaces between. This is the first example we have seen of a semantic error: the code runs without producing an error message, but it doesn’t do the “right” thing.
These values belong to different types: 2 is an integer, and 'Hello, World!' is a string, so-called because it contains a “string” of letters. You (and the interpreter) can identify strings because they are enclosed in quotation marks.
The print statement also works for integers.
>>> print(4)
4
If you are not sure what type a value has, the interpreter can tell you.
>>> type('hello, world')
<class 'str'>
>>> type (4)
<class 'int'>
>>> type ('17')
<class 'str'>
Not surprisingly, strings belong to the type str and integers belong to the type int. Less obviously, numbers with a decimal point belong to a type called float, because these numbers are represented in a format called floating-point.
>>> type(3.2)
<class 'float'>
What about values like '17' and '3.2'? They look like numbers, but they are in quotation marks
like strings.
>>> type('17')
<class 'str'>
>>> type('3.2')
<class 'str'>
They’re strings.
When you type a large integer, you might be tempted to use commas between groups of three digits, as in 1,000,000. This is not a legal integer in Python, but it is legal:
>>> print (1,000,000)
1 0 0
Well, that’s not what we expected at all! Python interprets 1,000,000 as a comma-separated se-quence of integers, which it prints with spaces between. This is the first example we have seen of a semantic error: the code runs without producing an error message, but it doesn’t do the “right” thing.
