Python

Important changes from Java

• When you pass an object to a function, and "reassign" it using its local function argument name, the outside objects won't get reassigned. This is because Python reassigns the local name only. This is a important difference from Java.

Useful techniques

• To iterate over two lists at the same time, use the zip built-in function:

for a,b in zip(list1, list2):

Casts

• To cast a float to an integer, you can use the built-in int() function.

Exceptions

• Sample code to deal with an exception:

	try:
	    doSomething()
	except Exception, inst:
	    print str(inst.args)
	    print str(sys.exc_info()[0])

This will give you information about the raised exception type.

Scopes

Within a module, inside a function, you can access the module variables normally. However, assigning them is not possible (you would assign a local variable). To assign a module variable inside a function, you need to specify that the variable is global by using the global keyword.

global myVariable

This is quite strange!

Classes

• You don't need to explicitely declare class fields, as they are dynamically created the first time you assign them.
• Every class method should take as a first argument "self".
• Accessing an object attribute, when the attribute does not exist, results in an exception. Code like:

if object.myAttribute:

will not work as expected if myAttribute was not assigned. One easy solution is to define in the class initializer method (__init__) the attribute and set it equal to None.