Python FAQ’s

An interpreted language is any programming language which is not in machine-level code before runtime. Therefore, Python is an interpreted language.

Python is a general-purpose programming language, which has a simple, easy-to-learn syntax which emphasizes readability and therefore reduces the cost of program maintenance. The language is capable of scripting, completely open-source and supports third-party packages encouraging modularity and code-reuse.

Its high-level data structures, combined with dynamic typing and dynamic binding, attract a huge community of developers for Rapid Application Development and deployment.

Typing refers to type-checking in programming languages. In a strongly-typed  language, such as Python, "1" + 2 will result in a type error, since these languages don't allow for "type-coercion" (implicit conversion of data types). On the other hand, a weakly-typed  language, such as Javascript, will simply output "12" as result.

Python being an interpreted language, executes each statement line by line and thus type-checking is done on the fly, during execution. Hence, Python is a Dynamically Typed language.

Type-checking can be done at two stages -

Static - Data Types are checked before execution.

Dynamic - Data Types are checked during execution.

An Interpreted language executes the statements line by line. Languages such as Python, Javascript, R, PHP and Ruby are prime examples of Interpreted languages. The Programs written in an interpreted language runs directly from the source code, with no intermediary compilation step.

PEP stands for Python Enhancement Proposal. A PEP is an official design document providing information to the Python Community, or describing a new feature for Python or its processes. PEP 8 is especially important since it documents the style guidelines for Python Code. Apparently contributing in the Python open-source community requires you to follow these style guidelines sincerely and strictly.

Memory management in Python is handled by the Python Memory Manager. The memory allocated by the manager is in the form of a private heap space dedicated for Python. All the Python objects are stored in this heap and being private, it is inaccessible to the programmer. Though, python does provide some core API functions to work upon the private heap space.

Additionally, Python has an in-built garbage collection to recycle the unused memory for the private heap space.

PEP stands for Python Enhancement Proposal. It is a set of rules that specify how to format Python code for maximum readability.

PYTHONPATH is an environment variable which is used when a module is imported. Whenever a module is imported, PYTHONPATH is also looked up to check for the presence of the imported modules in various directories. The interpreter uses it to determine which module to load.

In python Self is an instance or an object of a class. This is explicitly included as the first parameter. This is not the case in Java where it’s optional.  And it helps to differentiate between the methods and attributes of a class with local variables.

The self variable in the init method refers to the newly created object while in other methods, it refers to the object whose method was called.

A Python package refers to the collection of different sub-packages and modules based on the similarities of the function.

Indentation in Python is compulsory and is part of its syntax.

Pickling is a process where, Pickle module accepts any Python object, converts it into a string representation and dumps it into a file by using dump function.

The process of retrieving original Python objects from the stored string representation is called unpickling.

Python language is an interpreted language. Python program runs directly from the source code which is written by the programmer into an intermediate language, which is again translated into machine language that has to be executed.

All the programming languages have some way of defining the scope and extent of the block of codes. In Python, it is indentation. Indentation provides better readability to the code, which is probably why Python has made it compulsory.

To add a multiple-line comment in Python, all the lines should be prefixed by the hash symbol (#).

Python is an all-purpose programming language, and it is also capable to perform scripting.

Python decorator is a specific change that we make in Python syntax to alter functions easily.

The difference between list and tuple is that list is mutable while tuple is not. Tuple can be hashed, for example., as a key for dictionaries.

The use of the split function in Python is that which breaks a string into shorter strings using the defined separator. It gives a list of all words present in the string.