
The Python Language Reference
*****************************

Release:
   2.6

Date:
   October 02, 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