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# The Python Language Reference

Release: | 2.6
Date: | December 20, 2008

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.

- Introduction
  - Alternate Implementations
  - Notation

- Lexical analysis
  - Line structure
  - Other tokens
  - Identifiers and keywords
  - Literals
  - Operators
  - Delimiters

- Data model
  - Objects, values and types
  - The standard type hierarchy
  - New-style and classic classes
  - Special method names

- Execution model
  - Naming and binding
  - Exceptions

- Expressions
  - Arithmetic conversions
  - Atoms
  - Primaries
  - The power operator
  - Unary arithmetic operations
  - Binary arithmetic operations
  - Shifting operations
  - Binary bitwise operations
  - Comparisons
  - Boolean operations
  - Lambdas
  - Expression lists
  - Evaluation order
  - Summary

- Simple statements
  - Expression statements
  - Assignment statements
  - The `assert` statement
  - The `pass` statement
  - The `del` statement
  - The `print` statement
  - The `return` statement
  - The `yield` statement
  - The `raise` statement
  - The `break` statement
  - The `continue` statement
  - The `import` statement
  - The `global` statement
  - The `exec` statement

- Compound statements
  - The `if` statement
  - The `while` statement
  - The `for` statement
  - The `try` statement
  - The `with` statement
  - Function definitions
  - Class definitions

- Top-level components
  - Complete Python programs
  - File input
  - Interactive input
  - Expression input

- Full Grammar specification

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