Begrippenlijst

This page contains an overview of all the concepts/terms in the Scripting course. Everything found on this page can also be found in the lecture texts, this page is intended for quickly looking up important concepts as a review for exams and not as exclusive study material. We councel everyone to attend the lectures and read the full lecture texts.

Filters

Begrippen

Concept: Initializing Variables

Creating a variable or initializing it, is one of the most fundamental concepts in programming. In Python, you can initialize a variable by simply writing down a name and assigning a value to it using the assignment operator =.

The assignment operator = expects a variable name on the left side and a value on the right side.

my_first_variable = "Hello World"

Concept: Variables

A variable contains data, it can be visualized as a "box" that holds data. While this isn't entirely correct, it is a valuable abstraction to familiarize ourselves with the concept. The "box" can contain data of any sort, e.g. strings (text such as an IP address), an integer (a number such as a port), a boolean (a true/false value such as a variable that indications which server are healthy), ...

Concept: Naming Variables

When naming variables in Python, there are some important rules you should keep in mind:

• Variable names can only start with a letter or an underscore (_), not a number.
• Variable names can only contain alphanumeric characters (a-z, A-Z, 0-9) and underscores (_).
• Variable names are case-sensitive — age, Age, and AGE are all considered unique.
• Variable names cannot be one of Python's reserved keywords such as if, class, or `def.

While the following are the hard rules, there are also some soft rules that are widely accepted in the Python community:

• Variables names should be in lowercase, with separate words separated by an underscore. This is called snake case.
• Use descriptive names for variables. For example, if you want to save a user's age as a variable, user_age is better than age or an abbreviation like ua.
• Avoid using single-character variable names except for iteration variables of the parameter of simple labmda functions.