Python

At last, we venture out of the comfort zone that C has afforded us for many many months and we begin to transition to more modern programming languages, harnessing the power that decades of “I wish I could…“ from past programmers have put into languages.

Parsing or concatenating strings in C? Quite a challenge, if you recall! Parsing or concatenating strings in Python? Much less troublesome! But it’s not all great… unlike C, which is a compiled language, Python can be run through an interpreter, which means that it can suffer some performance degradation when run alongside similar programs in C. Fortunately Python, like many modern programming languages, counts C as an ancestor and so it is syntactically extremely similar; this should make the transition from using C to Python a little bit easier.

• Lecture

  • Watch on Youtube
  • Watch on the CS50 Video Player
  • Download Lecture
  • Lecture Notes

• Short

  • Python

• Notes

  • Python

• Supplementary Resources

  • Python Software Foundation on Python Documentation
  • LearnPython.org on Python
  • Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute on Python basics

• Thought Questions

  • What was the point of studying C for so long if we are now taking the time to learn to code in Python? Isn’t Python just “better” overall?
  • In what situations might you use Python over C or vice versa?
  • What does it mean to be an interpreted language versus a compiled language? What are the pros and cons of each?

• Problem

  • Sentimental