The Python Language Reference

This reference manual describes the syntax and core semantics of the language. It is terse, but attempts to be exact and complete.

Elsewhere, the built-in object types and functions are described in Python built-ins reference. Standard library 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.

• 1. Introduction
  • 1.1. Alternate Implementations
  • 1.2. Notation
• 2. Lexical analysis
  • 2.1. Line structure
  • 2.2. Other tokens
  • 2.3. Names (identifiers and keywords)
  • 2.4. Literals
  • 2.5. String and Bytes literals
  • 2.6. Numeric literals
  • 2.7. Operators and delimiters
• 3. Data model
  • 3.1. Objects, values and types
  • 3.2. The standard type hierarchy
  • 3.3. Special method names
  • 3.4. Coroutines
• 4. Execution model
  • 4.1. Structure of a program
  • 4.2. Naming and binding
  • 4.3. Exceptions
  • 4.4. Runtime Components
• 5. The import system
  • 5.1. importlib
  • 5.2. Packages
  • 5.3. Searching
  • 5.4. Loading
  • 5.5. The Path Based Finder
  • 5.6. Replacing the standard import system
  • 5.7. Package Relative Imports
  • 5.8. Special considerations for __main__
  • 5.9. References
• 6. Expressions
  • 6.1. Arithmetic conversions
  • 6.2. Atoms
  • 6.3. Primaries
  • 6.4. Await expression
  • 6.5. The power operator
  • 6.6. Unary arithmetic and bitwise operations
  • 6.7. Binary arithmetic operations
  • 6.8. Shifting operations
  • 6.9. Binary bitwise operations
  • 6.10. Comparisons
  • 6.11. Boolean operations
  • 6.12. Assignment expressions
  • 6.13. Conditional expressions
  • 6.14. Lambdas
  • 6.15. Expression lists
  • 6.16. Evaluation order
  • 6.17. Operator precedence
• 7. Simple statements
  • 7.1. Expression statements
  • 7.2. Assignment statements
  • 7.3. The assert statement
  • 7.4. The pass statement
  • 7.5. The del statement
  • 7.6. The return statement
  • 7.7. The yield statement
  • 7.8. The raise statement
  • 7.9. The break statement
  • 7.10. The continue statement
  • 7.11. The import statement
  • 7.12. The global statement
  • 7.13. The nonlocal statement
  • 7.14. The type statement
• 8. Compound statements
  • 8.1. The if statement
  • 8.2. The while statement
  • 8.3. The for statement
  • 8.4. The try statement
  • 8.5. The with statement
  • 8.6. The match statement
  • 8.7. Function definitions
  • 8.8. Class definitions
  • 8.9. Coroutines
  • 8.10. Type parameter lists
  • 8.11. Annotations
• 9. Top-level components
  • 9.1. Complete Python programs
  • 9.2. File input
  • 9.3. Interactive input
  • 9.4. Expression input
• 10. Full Grammar specification