1.3: The first program

Traditionally, the first program you write in a new language is called “Hello, World!” because all it does is display the words “Hello, World!”. In Python, it looks like this:

>>> print('Hello, World!')

This is an example of a print statement, although it doesn’t actually print anything on paper. It displays a result on the screen. In this case, the result is the words

Hello, World!

The quotation marks in the program mark the beginning and end of the text to be displayed; they don’t appear in the result.

The parentheses indicate that print is a function. We’ll get to functions in Chapter 3.

In Python 2, the print statement is slightly different; it is not a function, so it doesn’t use parentheses.

>>> print 'Hello, World!'

This distinction will make more sense soon, but that’s enough to get started.

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