Fluent Python

Python Jargon

Many terms here are not exclusive to Python, of course, but particularly in the definitions you may find meanings that are specific to the Python community.

Also see the official Python glossary.

ABC (programming language)

A programming language created by Leo Geurts, Lambert Meertens, and Steven Pemberton. Guido van Rossum, who developed Python, worked as a programmer implementing the ABC environment in the 1980s. Block structuring by indentation, built-in tuples and dictionaries, tuple unpacking, the semantics of the for loop, and uniform handling of all sequence types are some of the distinctive characteristics of Python that came from ABC.

Abstract base class (ABC)

A class that cannot be instantiated, only subclassed. ABCs are how interfaces are formalized in Python. Instead of inheriting from an ABC, a class may also declare that it fulfills the interface by registering with the ABC to become a virtual subclass.

accessor

A method implemented to provide access to a single data attribute. Some authors use accessor as a generic term encompassing getter and setter methods, others use it to refer only to getters, referring to setters as mutators.

aliasing

Assigning two or more names to the same object. For example, in a = []; b = a the variables a and b are aliases for the same list object. Aliasing happens naturally all the time in any language where variables store references to objects. To avoid confusion, just forget the idea that variables are boxes ...