18 Features of Python Programming Language

Python has taken over the programming world in the past few decades. Developed in the 1980s by Guido van Rossum and then further released in February 1991. While developing the language, he had a couple of features in mind that went on to change the face of programming.

These features made Python stand out for ease of access and usage, which is the major reason behind its popularity.

Let’s dive into these features of Python.

Features of Python

1. Simple Syntax

When it comes to programming, understanding the syntax of the language is very important. The program will not work if it’s not syntactically correct. With different languages, the ease with which you code, comes with practice.

In Python, the developers of the language wanted to make sure that the language would be as close to the human language as possible. This was done while keeping the programming rules in mind and hence the language has a simple syntax.

2. Easy to Learn

Python being simple to code is one of the main reasons the language has become popular over time. The simple syntax allows people to work with it easily.

It allows people who are not familiar with programming to pick up a new language quickly. It also gives an advantage to developers to code without having to debug or have errors in the code too often.

3. Free and Open Source

When Guido Van Rossum was developing the language, he was set on the idea that the language should be available to all. This allowed people from all around the world to access the language with ease and also help build the language further.

Python is a free/libre and open-source software (FLOSS), which makes reading the source code, distributing the software, and making changes to it quite easy.

4. High-level Language

Languages like Machine Language and assembly language are what we call low-level languages. These need some practice and work to understand the syntax. 

Low-level languages focus on the ease with which your computer can understand the code. This makes it harder for the programmer or developer to work with.

Python is a high-level programming language, which focuses on making the code easier for the programmer. High-Level languages are easier to comprehend and work with. 

High-level languages are slower than low-level languages because their syntax is not understood by the machine. In high-level languages, there comes a step where you need to convert this code into a code the computer can understand (low-level code) either during or before runtime. 

However, people still prefer high-level languages like Python because of the ease and simplicity of working with them. 

5. Interpreted

To understand how this feature separates Python from other programming languages, let’s understand the difference between a compiled language and an interpreted language.

In a compiled language, the program is first converted into binary code so that your computer can understand it. 

Only after this first step does your computer execute the code, as depicted in the flowchart below.

In interpreted languages, the step of first converting the main code into a binary code does not take place. The code is then converted to machine code during runtime, which makes the language easy to debug and portable, as seen in the flowchart below.

6. Memory Allocation

Now that we have established how a high-level language and interpreted language works, let’s look at how the memory allocation in such a language takes place.

In Python, memory allocation becomes easier because when you assign a value to a variable, automatic memory allocation takes place during run time.

7. Portable

Portability is one of the major advantages of using Python. Python is free for all open-source languages and high-level languages which allows you to work on multiple platforms and operating systems. 

You can use python on operating systems such as Linux, UNIX, Windows, Mac OS X / OS X / macOS, etc.

8. Object-Oriented

When we talk about object-oriented programming, the main goal here is to focus on the data and functionality and build the program around the object.

Let us look at some of the advantages of object-oriented programming languages. OOP allows the reusability of codes. 

It also works on data redundancy, which allows you to store the data in multiple memory locations. Data redundancy provides memory backup in case you lose the memory at one location. 

Having OOP, in turn, allows the concept of inheritance, polymorphism, and encapsulation to come into play.

9. Procedure-oriented

Python is one of the few programming languages that supports both object-oriented programming as well as Procedural Programming.

This feature allows you to work on the reusable functions that focus on solving the problem at hand. 

You can also use this feature to call the same function in other areas of the code as well.

10. Classes

Python is an object-oriented programming language that allows the use of classes. 

You can use OOP to create multiple parent and child classes. These classes follow the class inheritance rules. This allows the parent class to override any method of the child class. The mechanism also allows the child to call a method from the parent class.

11. Extensible

Python has a very helpful feature that allows developers who are comfortable and confident with  C/C++/Java code to write code in these languages. This makes Python extensible as you can extend these languages onto other programming languages.

Since C and C++ are not interpreted languages, the code is first converted to machine code and then run on Python. 

12. Embeddable

Python also has a feature that allows you to generate codes in other languages and embed them into python code or vice-versa.

13. Extensive Standard Library

Python is free and open-source, which led people from all around the world to come up with libraries focusing on various areas. 

Over time, there has been a generation of a vast range of libraries, starting from libraries for documentation, regulation to machine learning, natural language processing, web scraping, etc.

14. Wide Range of In-Built Functions

Other than the functions that these wide ranges of libraries provide, Python has a set of extensive inbuilt functions that can be used without accessing any library.

15. Supports exception handling

When programs are created, a good number of them will have certain functions, inputs or problems that, when faced, can disrupt the flow of the program.

These are considered to be exceptions. If they are identified in advance can prevent the program from either crashing or going into an infinite loop.

Python is one of the few languages that are capable of supporting exception handling to a great extent which makes it a developer and programmer’s favorite language.

16. Robust

Python’s ability to work well with exceptions and exception handling, as well as its ease of use and comprehension has made the error rate in the code reduce. This makes the language a very reliable and robust language to work with.

17. Advance features

Python has a wide range of other advanced features such as list, dataframes, dictionary, and generator comprehensions.

18. GUI Programming Support

Now, we have established that Python has a vast range of libraries. One of their unique libraries is the Graphic User Interface library which developers use for developing Desktop applications.

Summary

Python over time has become a widely used and loved programming language. Here, we looked at all the features of Python that make the language stand out.

We looked at how the features separated python from other languages and how it made life different and relatively easier for programmers and developers across the world.