So we are going to look at our first code. As python is an interpreted language , you can directly write the code into the python interpreter or write in a file and then run the file. First we are going to do that using the interpreter, to start type python in the command prompt (shell or terminal).
[kd@kdlappy ~]$ python
Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Oct 30 2007, 13:54:11)
[GCC 4.1.2 20070925 (Red Hat 4.1.2-33)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>
In our first code we are going to print "Hello World!" , so do it as below,
>>> print "Hello World!"
Hello World!
Now as a serious programmer you may want to write the above code into a source file. We will create a helloworld.py. Use any text editor you like to create the file. I used vi, you can even use GUI based tools like Kate, gedit too.
#!/usr/bin/env python
print "Hello World!"
To run the code first you have to make the file executable, in GNU/Linux you can do that by giving the command in a shell or terminal
$ chmod +x helloworld.py
$ ./helloworld.py
Hello World!
On the first line you can
#! , we call it sha-bang. Using this we are telling that use python interpreter to run this code. In the next line we are printing a text message. In python we call all the line of texts as strings.
