The Python Language Reference — Python 3.14.3 documentation

The Python Language Reference¶ This reference manual describes the syntax and “core semantics” of the language. It is terse, but attempts to be exact and complete. The semantics of non-essential built-in object types and of the built-in functions and modules are described in The Python Standard Library. For an informal introduction to the language, see The Python Tutorial. For C or C++ programmers, two additional manuals exist: Extending and Embedding the Python Interpreter describes the high-level picture of how to write a Python extension module, and the Python/C API reference manual describes the interfaces available to C/C++ programmers in detail. 1. Introduction 1.1. Alternate Implementations 1.2. Notation 2. Lexical analysis 2.1. Line structure 2.2. Other tokens 2.3. Names (identifiers and keywords) 2.4. Literals 2.5. String and Bytes literals 2.6. Numeric literals 2.7. Operators and delimiters 3. Data model 3.1. Objects, values and types 3.2. The standard type hierarchy 3.3. Special method names 3.4. Coroutines 4. Execution model 4.1. Structure of a program 4.2. Naming and binding 4.3. Exceptions 4.4. Runtime Components 5. The import system 5.1. importlib 5.2. Packages 5.3. Searching 5.4. Loading 5.5. The Path Based Finder 5.6. Replacing the standard import system 5.7. Package Relative Imports 5.8. Special considerations for __main__ 5.9. References 6. Expressions 6.1. Arithmetic conversions 6.2. Atoms 6.3. Primaries 6.4. Await expression 6.5. The power operator 6.6. Unary arithmetic and bitwise operations 6.7. Binary arithmetic operations 6.8. Shifting operations 6.9. Binary bitwise operations 6.10. Comparisons 6.11. Boolean operations 6.12. Assignment expressions 6.13. Conditional expressions 6.14. Lambdas 6.15. Expression lists 6.16. Evaluation order 6.17. Operator precedence 7. Simple statements 7.1. Expression statements 7.2. Assignment statements 7.3. The assert statement 7.4. The pass statement 7.5. The del statement 7.6. The return statement 7.7. The yield statement 7.8. The raise statement 7.9. The break statement 7.10. The continue statement 7.11. The import statement 7.12. The global statement 7.13. The nonlocal statement 7.14. The type statement 8. Compound statements 8.1. The if statement 8.2. The while statement 8.3. The for statement 8.4. The try statement 8.5. The with statement 8.6. The match statement 8.7. Function definitions 8.8. Class definitions 8.9. Coroutines 8.10. Type parameter lists 8.11. Annotations 9. Top-level components 9.1. Complete Python programs 9.2. File input 9.3. Interactive input 9.4. Expression input 10. Full Grammar specification © Copyright 2001 Python Software Foundation. This page is licensed under the Python Software Foundation License Version 2. Examples, recipes, and other code in the documentation are additionally licensed under the Zero Clause BSD License. See History and License for more information. The Python Software Foundation is a non-profit corporation. Please donate. Last updated on Feb 28, 2026 (07:29 UTC). Found a bug? Created using Sphinx 8.2.3.