ENGI-1020 Lecture 3: Literals and Operators

Vocabulary flashcards covering core Python concepts from ENGI-1020 Lecture 3, including expressions, numeric/string/Boolean literals, variables, functions, operator categories, and precedence.

Expression

A combination of values and operators that evaluates to a single result.

Literals

Built-in primitive types (building blocks) in Python that contain a pure simple value and literally mean what they say.

Integer Literal

A numeric literal that represents whole numbers, which can be formatted conventionally (e.g., $1$, $56$), with underscores (e.g., $1\_000\_000$), or in other bases such as binary ($0\text{b}10110$), octal ($0\text{o}21$), and hexadecimal ($0\text{x}12\text{c}$).

Float Literal

A numeric literal representing real numbers written with decimals or scientific notation (e.g., $3.14$, $2\text{e}25$), which can be subject to round-off errors due to fundamental computer limitations in floating-point arithmetic.

Imaginary Literal

A literal representing the imaginary part of a complex number, formed by appending a $j$ suffix to an integer or floating-point prefix (e.g., $1\text{j}$, $1.0\text{j}$).

Complex Expression

An expression representing a full complex number (such as $1 + 2\text{j}$) produced by adding a real number literal and an imaginary literal.

String Literal

A literal composed of characters enclosed by matching pairs of single or double quotation marks.

Boolean Literal

Case-sensitive primitive values in Python that represent truth values: True and False.

Variable

A named value stored for use in a program.

Function

A block of code that only runs when it is called; it can accept parameters (input data) and return data as a result.

Module

A file containing Python code that can be imported into other implementations.

Operators

Special symbols or keywords used to perform operations on values and variables.

Integer Division Operator ($//$)

An arithmetic operator (also called floor division) that divides two numbers and returns the quotient rounded down to the nearest whole integer.

Modulo Operator ($\%$)

An arithmetic operator that yields the remainder of dividing one number by another.

Operator Precedence

The set of rules (such as BEMDAS or PEMDAS) specifying the execution order of different operators within an expression.

Exponentiation Associativity

The right-to-left evaluation order used as a tie-breaker for the power operator ($**$), meaning $2 ** 3 ** 2$ evaluates as $2^{(3^2)} = 2^9 = 512$.

Assignment Operators

Operators used to assign values to variables, including basic assignment ($=$) and compound shortcuts (such as $+=$, $-=$, $*=$, $/=$, $**=$, and $\%=$).

Comparison Operators

Operators ($<$, $>$, $<=$, $>=$, $==$, $!=$) that evaluate relationships between numerical operands and produce a Boolean result (True or False).

Logical Operators

Operators (and, or, not, and ^ / xor) whose operands and evaluated results are Boolean values.

Membership Operators

Operators (in and not in) that determine whether a specific value exists within a sequence (such as a string or list), returning a Boolean value.

Bitwise Operators

Operators ($\&$, $|$, ^, $\sim$, $<<$, $>>$) that perform low-level operations directly on the binary bits of integer operands and return integer values.