What is a program?
A program is a set of instructions that tells the computer how to perform a specific task. A programming language is a language used to create programs. We will be using Python to create our first program.
Does this mean I can make my computer do anything?
Yeah, true within its limits.
Everything involves giving instructions. E.g.: When you click on the Play button on a media player and the music starts playing, there is a program working behind the scenes which tell the computer to turn on the music when the Play button is clicked.
Writing our first Python program
Let’s start with a hello world program, usually, the first program learned when studying a language. We want to display “Hello World” on the output screen. But, how?
Let’s see.
To tell the computer to write to the screen, we use the print statement.
print()It is a built-in function in Python to display things on the screen.
A built-in function is a function that is predefined and can be used directly.
Whatever we want to display, needs to be written inside brackets and enclosed within double quotes ” “. So, to display Hello World:
print(“Hello World”)Output: Hello World
Comments and Indentation in Python
Comments in Python
Comments are pieces of code that are ignored by the Python interpreter. Comments are written to make source code easier to understand by other people. Python supports single-line comments, meaning that they can cover only one line. Anything written following # is considered a single-line comment in Python.
# This is a comment in Python.Understanding Indentation
Indentation in Python refers to the (spaces and tabs) that are used at the beginning of a statement. The statements with the same indentation belong to the same group called a suite. Thus, it is used to create or represent a block of code.
For example, Let’s try and run the below code,
print("Hello Programmer!")
print("I am indented")The above piece of code will give an error since the second print statement is indented which is not expected. You will surely understand this more once you write more code in Python.
To Summarize
The print() function can be used to write the output on the screen.
The text to be printed has to be enclosed in quotes (” “)print() is a built-in function.
# is used to write comments in Python. The concept of indentation has to be kept in mind while writing the code in Python
