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2.3. Variable names and keywords 13

2.3 Variable names and keywords

Programmers generally choose names for their variables that are meaningful—they docu-
ment what the variable is used for.
Variable names can be arbitrarily long. They can contain both letters and numbers, but
they have to begin with a letter. It is legal to use uppercase letters, but it is a good idea to
begin variable names with a lowercase letter (you’ll see why later).
The underscore character, _, can appear in a name. It is often used in names with multiple
words, such as my_name or airspeed_of_unladen_swallow .
If you give a variable an illegal name, you get a syntax error:

>>> 76trombones = 'big parade '
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
>>> more@ = 1000000
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
>>> class = 'Advanced Theoretical Zymurgy '
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
76trombones is illegal because it does not begin with a letter. more@ is illegal because it
contains an illegal character, @. But what’s wrong with class ?

It turns out that class is one of Python’s keywords. The interpreter uses keywords to
recognize the structure of the program, and they cannot be used as variable names.

Python 2 has 31 keywords:
and del from not while
as elif global or with
assert else if pass yield
break except import print
class exec in raise
continue finally is return
def for lambda try
In Python 3, exec is no longer a keyword, but nonlocal is.
You might want to keep this list handy. If the interpreter complains about one of your
variable names and you don’t know why, see if it is on this list.

2.4 Operators and operands

Operators are special symbols that represent computations like addition and multiplica-
tion. The values the operator is applied to are called operands.

The operators +, -, *, / and ** perform addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and
exponentiation, as in the following examples:
20+32 hour-1 hour*60+minute minute/60 5**2 (5+9)*(15-7)
In some other languages, ^ is used for exponentiation, but in Python it is a bitwise operator
called XOR. I won’t cover bitwise operators in this book, but you can read about them at
http://wiki.python.org/moin/BitwiseOperators .
In Python 2, the division operator might not do what you expect: