Page 40 -

starting to code

So how do you run your code?

There are two things that you will need to run the guessing-game
program: an editor and an interpreter.

The editor saves the code you write into a file on your hard disk. The
code (sometimes called the source code) is just text, and it can be
written and read by humans.

The editor will save the
source code into a file.

.py

The source code

But computers can’t process text meant for humans, at least not very well.
That’s why we need a tool to translate the human-friendly source code Hmmm... looks
into the binary 1s and 0s that computers do understand. That’s what an like a guessing
interpreter does. In this book, an interpreter called Python is used. game...

The Python
interpreter

.py
The interpreter translates
the text of the source
code into language that the
computer can understand.

So we need an editor and a Python interpreter. Fortunately, Python 3
comes with a built-in application called IDLE, which does both jobs and
more. IDLE enables you to write and edit Python code, it translates this
code into binary form, and finally, it runs the Python 3 program. Because
of this, IDLE is known as an Integrated Development Environment.

Let’s see these steps in action.

you are here 4 5