Chapter Summary

And that’s a wrap for our concise data type tour. This chapter has offered a brief introduction to Python’s core object types and the sorts of operations we can apply to them. We’ve studied generic operations that work on many object types (sequence operations such as indexing and slicing, for example), as well as type-specific operations available as method calls (for instance, string splits and list appends). We’ve also defined some key terms, such as immutability, sequences, and polymorphism.

Along the way, we’ve seen that Python’s core object types are more flexible and powerful than what is available in lower-level languages such as C. For instance, Python’s lists and dictionaries obviate most of the work you do to support collections and searching in lower-level languages. Lists are ordered collections of other objects, and dictionaries are collections of other objects that are indexed by key instead of by position. Both dictionaries and lists may be nested, can grow and shrink on demand, and may contain objects of any type. Moreover, their space is automatically cleaned up as you go.

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I’ve skipped most of the details here in order to provide a quick tour, so you shouldn’t expect all of this chapter to have made sense yet. In the next few chapters, we’ll start to dig deeper, filling in details of Python’s core object types that were omitted here so you can gain a more complete understanding. We’ll start off in the next chapter with an in-depth look at Python numbers. First, though, another quiz to review.