Programming the OLPC Laptop using Python - Python tutorial

Category: Python tutorials > Development - Difficulty:

Although users usually think of Python as a procedural and object-oriented language, it actually contains everything you need for a completely functional approach to programming. This article discusses general concepts of functional programming, and illustrates ways of implementing functional techniques in Python.

In this tutorial, you make a python file, save it to the desktop, and learn how to change the directory in the terminal so it points to the desktop and run the file. Then, learn how to make it executable.

Boolean expressions are expressions that have the values ‘True’ or ‘False’ as results.

Today, we are going to talk about the while loop. It is a control structure. Normally, statements are executed from the top down line by line. A control structure decides when and if they will be executed.

XML is a fairly simple format. It uses plain Unicode text rather than binary encoding, and all the structures are declared with predictable-looking tags. Nonetheless, there are still enough rules in the XML grammar that a carefully debugged parser is needed to process XML documents -- and every parser imposes its own particular programming style. An alternative is to make XML even simpler. The open-source PYX format is a purely line-oriented format for representing XML documents that allows for much easier processing of XML document contents with common text tools like grep, sed, awk, wc, and the usual UNIX collection.