3. Writing Programs

In This Chapter

Using IDLE’s Editor

Compiling Source Code

Reading Strings from the Keyboard

Printing Strings on the Screen

Source Code Comments

Structuring a Program

Up to now, we’ve been writing single Python statements and running them at the interactive command line. While that’s useful for learning about Python functions, it quickly becomes tiresome when you need to write many lines of Python code.

Thus we turn to writing programs (also known as scripts). Programs are just text files containing a collection of Python commands. When you run (or execute) a program, Python performs each statement in the file one after the other.

In this chapter, we’ll learn how to write and run programs in IDLE and from the command line. ...

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