And Everything Else - Python

As mentioned earlier, everything you can process in a Python script is a type of object, so our object type tour is necessarily incomplete. However, even though everything in Python is an “object,” only those types of objects we’ve met so far are considered part of Python’s core type set. Other object types in Python are usually implemented by module functions, not language syntax. They also tend to have application-specific roles—text patterns, database interfaces, network connections, and so on.

Moreover, keep in mind that the objects we’ve met here are objects, but not necessarily object-oriented—a concept that usually requires inheritance and the Pythonclassstatement, which we’ll meet again later in this book. Still, Python’s core objects are the workhorses of almost every Python script you’re likely to meet, and they usually are the basis of larger noncore types.

Chapter Summary

And that’s a wrap for our concise data type tour. This chapter has offered a brief introduction to Python’s core object types, and the sorts of operations we can apply to them. We’ve studied generic operations that work on many object types (sequence operations such as indexing and slicing, for example), as well as type-specific operations available as method calls (for instance, string splits and list appends). We’ve also defined some key terms along the way, such as immutability, sequences, and polymorphism.

Along the way, we’ve seen that Python’s core object types are more flexible and powerful than what is available in lower-level languages such as C. For instance, lists and dictionaries obviate most of the work you do to support collections and searching in lower-level languages. Lists are ordered collections of other objects, and dictionaries are collections of other objects that are indexed by key instead of by position. Both dictionaries and lists may be nested, can grow and shrink on demand, and may contain objects of any type. Moreover, their space is automatically cleaned up as you go.

I’ve skipped most of the details here in order to provide a quick tour, so you shouldn’t expect all of this chapter to have made sense yet. In the next few chapters, we’ll start to dig deeper, filling in details of Python’s core object types that were omitted here so you can gain a more complete understanding. We’ll start off in the next chapter with an in-depth look at Python numbers. First, though, another quiz to review.

BRAIN BUILDER

Chapter Quiz

We’ll explore the concepts introduced in this chapter in more detail in upcoming chapters, so we’ll just cover the big ideas here:

1. Name four of Python’s core data types.
   
2. Why are they called “core” data types?
   
3. What does “immutable” mean, and which three of Python’s core types are considered immutable?
   
4. What does “sequence” mean, and which three types fall into that category?
   
5. What does “mapping” mean, and which core type is a mapping?
   
6. What is “polymorphism,” and why should you care?

Quiz Answers

1. Numbers, strings, lists, dictionaries, tuples, and files are generally considered to be the core object (data) types. Sets, types, None, and Booleans are sometimes classified this way as well. There are multiple number types (integer, long, floating point, and decimal) and two string types (normal and Unicode).

2. They are known as “core” types because they are part of the Python language itself, and are always available; to create other objects, you generally must call functions in imported modules. Most of the core types have specific syntax for generating the objects: 'spam, 'for example, is an expression that makes a string and determines the set of operations that can be applied to it. Because of this, core types are hardwired into Python’s syntax. In contrast, you must call the built-inopenfunction to create a file object.

3. An “immutable” object is an object that cannot be changed after it is created. Numbers, strings, and tuples in Python fall into this category. While you cannot change an immutable object in-place, you can always make a new one by running an expression.
   
4. A “sequence” is a positionally ordered collection of objects. Strings, lists, and tuples are all sequences in Python. They share common sequence operations, such as indexing, concatenation, and slicing, but also have type-specific method calls.
   
5. The term “mapping” denotes an object that maps keys to associated values. Python’s dictionary is the only mapping type in the core type set. Mappings do not maintain any left-to-right positional ordering; they support access to data stored by key, plus type-specific method calls.
   
6. “Polymorphism” means that the meaning of an operation (like a+) depends on the objects being operated on. This turns out to be a key idea (perhaps the key idea) behind using Python well—not constraining code to specific types makes that code automatically applicable to many types.

* In this book, the term literal simply means an expression whose syntax generates an object—sometimes also called a constant. Note that the term “constant” does not imply objects or variables that can never be changed (i.e., this term is unrelated to C++’s const or Python’s “immutable”—a topic explored later in this chapter).

* This matrix structure works for small-scale tasks, but for more serious number crunching, you will probably want to use one of the numeric extensions to Python, such as the open source NumPy system. Such tools
can store and process large matrixes much more efficiently than our nested list structure. NumPy has been said to turn Python into the equivalent of a free and more powerful version of the MatLab system, and organizations such as NASA, Los Alamos, and JPMorgan Chase use this tool for scientific and financial tasks. Search the Web for more details.

* One footnote here: keep in mind that the rec record we just created really could be a database record, when we employ Python’s object persistence system—an easy way to store native Python objects in files or accessby-key databases. We won’t go into more details here; see Python’s pickle and shelve modules for more details.