PDA Glossary

A style of programming in which data and the operations that manipulate it are organized into classes and methods.

A language that provides features, such as programmerdefined types and methods, that facilitate object-oriented programming.

A statement that check a condition and raises an exception if it fails.

A condition that should always be true during the execution of a program.

A style of program design in which the majority of functions are pure.

A function that changes one or more of the objects it receives as arguments. Most modifiers are void; that is, they return None.

A function that does not modify any of the objects it receives as arguments. Most pure functions are fruitful.

A development plan that involves high-level insight into the problem and more planning than incremental development or prototype development.

A development plan that involves writing a rough draft of a program, testing, and correcting errors as they are found.

A diagram that shows objects, their attributes, and the values of the attributes.

To copy the contents of an object as well as any embedded objects, and any objects embedded in them, and so on; implemented by the deepcopy function in the copy module.

To copy the contents of an object, including any references to embedded objects; implemented by the copy function in the copy module.

An object that is stored as an attribute of another object.

One of the named values associated with an object.

To create a new object.

An object that belongs to a class.

An object that contains information about a programmer-defined type. The class object can be used to create instances of the type.

A programmer-defined type. A class definition creates a new class object.

An object that represents a running program, allowing a Python program to run commands and read the results.

A program that allows users to type commands and then executes them by starting other programs.

An object similar to a string.

A file whose contents are organized like a dictionary with keys that correspond to values.

To prevent an exception from terminating a program using the try and except statements.

A path that starts from the topmost directory in the file system.

A path that starts from the current directory.

A string that identifies a file.

A named collection of files, also called a folder.

A sequence of characters stored in permanent storage like a hard drive.

A sequence of characters in a format string, like %d, that specifies how a value should be formatted.

A string, used with the format operator, that contains format sequences.

An operator, %, that takes a format string and a tuple and generates a string that includes the elements of the tuple formatted as specified by the format string.

Pertaining to a program that runs indefinitely and keeps at least some of its data in permanent storage.

An error caused because a value has the wrong shape; that is, the wrong type or size.

A collection of related values, often organized in lists, dictionaries, tuples, etc.