10. Glossary¶

collection data type

A data type in which the values are made up of components, or elements, that are themselves values.

dot notation

Use of the dot operator, ., to access functions inside a module, or to access methods and attributes of an object.

immutable

Data types whose content cannot be changed after creation (e.g., strings, ints, floats, tuples).

index

A variable or value used to select a member of an ordered collection, such as a character from a string, or an element from a list.

slice

A part of a string (substring) specified by a range of indices. More generally, a subsequence of any sequence type in Python can be created using the slice operator (sequence[start:stop]).

traverse

To iterate through the elements of a collection, performing a similar operation on each.

whitespace

Any of the characters that move the cursor without printing visible characters. The constant string.whitespace contains all the white-space characters.