This is a small script / program that outputs the string plus a newline on the standar output.
The first line is the shebang that tells my terminal how to run the program. This way I only have to execute my script and the terminal feeds it into python. An alternative is to run it directly with python like so: python helloworld.py
Then we have a empty line that gets ignored by Python. The last line contains a built-in function called "print" and this function accepts a couple of arguments. In this case I gave it the string "Hello World".
Print objects to the text stream file, separated by sep and followed by end. sep, end, file and flush, if present, must be given as keyword arguments.
All non-keyword arguments are converted to strings like str() does and written to the stream, separated by sep and followed by end. Both sep and end must be strings; they can also be None, which means to use the default values. If no objects are given, print() will just write end.
The file argument must be an object with a write(string) method; if it is not present or None, sys.stdout will be used. Since printed arguments are converted to text strings, print() cannot be used with binary mode file objects. For these, use file.write(...) instead.
Whether output is buffered is usually determined by file, but if the flush keyword argument is true, the stream is forcibly flushed.
Changed in version 3.3: Added the flush keyword argument.
So based on the information given in this first section I could spend days talking. But this is a beginners course on programming. We happen to use Python as our tool of learning so lets get some basics out of the way first. Its fine if not everything is understood from the start because I will revisit them later.
The help text of print talks about values, streams, sys.stdout. It mentions functions, objects and modules. It also mentions optional keywords and strings. We only have 2.5 days so I will need to leave out a lot of things that Python offers. Some will be covered in other courses Astron will give but others will need to be learned through other means.
