Python provides an editing mode for emacs, which will be automatically loaded if the following lines are present in the .emacs file.

(autoload 'python-mode "python-mode" "Python editing mode." t) (setq auto-mode-alist (cons '("\\.py$" . python-mode) auto-mode-alist)) (setq interpreter-mode-alist (cons '("python" . python-mode) interpreter-mode-alist))

Imagine that you have some Python code that needs to do some quick number crunching. After prototyping the algorithm in Python you find that it is far too slow for your purposes. To produce results faster you rewrite the algorithm in C. However, you would still like to have access to the data in Python as well. There are a number of reasons that you might need access to the data in both C and Python. Perhaps you need to generate the data in C and then simply access it in Python to format it and display in on a webpage or otherwise visualize the data. Perhaps you generate the dataset in Python and simply want to leverage C to get some of your calculations finished a bit faster.

Lists are arbitrary collections of objects that can be nested. They are created by enclosing the comma separated items in square brackets. As strings they can be indexed and sliced, but as opposite to strings, it is also possible to modify them.

Modules are essentially similar to header files in C, but not exactly, and modules are similar to libraries, but not exactly. All Python files only look like scripts until they are "imported" by another Python program. Importing allows you to include a Python script and all the functions and variables it contains inside of another script or program. Code reuse is one of the primary reasons for having Modules.

Modules also create namespaces, which may or may not mean something do you. Suffice it to lssay that modules create there own scope, kind of like global and local scope, or local and function scope.