Writing Our First Code

In this lesson, we'll examine one of the simplest codes in Python syntax.

We'll cover the following

In this lesson, we will start writing code! So, let’s move on to the fun stuff.

The print Statement

Whenever we learn a new language, it is an age-old tradition to start by displaying the text “Hello World” on the screen.

Every language has a different syntax for displaying or printing something on the screen.

Since Python is one of the most readable languages out there, we can print data on the terminal by simply using the print statement.

Here’s what the statement looks like:

print (data)

Whatever we need to print is encapsulated in the parentheses following the print keyword. Let’s try printing “Hello World” on the terminal:

print("Hello World")

The text Hello World is bounded by quotation marks because it is a string or a group of characters.

Next, we’ll print a few numbers. Each call to print moves the output to a new line:

print(50)
print(1000)
print(3.142)

Printing Multiple Pieces of Data #

We can even print multiple things in a single print command; we just have to separate them using commas.

Let’s see this in action:

print(50, 1000, 3.142, "Hello World")

By default, each print statement prints text in a new line. If we want multiple print statements to print in the same line, we can use the following code:

print("Hello", end="")
print("World")
print("Hello", end=" ")
print("World")

The value of end is appended to the output and the next print will continue from here.

Comments #

Comments are pieces of text used to describe what is happening in the code. They have no effect on the code whatsoever.

A comment can be written using the # character:

print(50)  # This line prints 50
print("Hello World")  # This line prints Hello World
# This is just a comment hanging out on its own!
# For multi-line comments, we must
# add the hashtag symbol
# each time

An alternative to these multi-line comments (line 4 - 8) are docstrings. They are encased in triple quotes, """, and can be used to replace multi-line comments:

""" Docstrings are pretty cool
for writing longer comments
or notes about the code"""