What did this code do?
Teacher,
Cat enthusiast
- The 2022 End of Year Website Update - 01/01/2023
- Celebrating Ada Lovelace day - 10/10/2022
- Website update 5/9/22 - 05/09/2022
Now you have your first piece of code working, let’s take a look and explain what that piece of code does.
print("Hello World")
This is referred to as a print statement and all it does is output whatever is held in the brackets to the screen / console.
In our example here we have the words Hello World wrapped in some speech marks.
The speech marks are important because this tells Python that we want to output some text (but it can also contain numbers) onto the screen.
In programming we call this text (or any alphanumeric words or number, combinations) a string.
Our print statement contains the string “Hello World”.
Programming Vocabulary
This is an excellent opportunity to prepare and remind you that programming does contain some very technical vocabulary.
In the above explanation, we’ve introduced 2 of these pieces of vocabulary statement and string and throughout this course I will be using this and other vocabulary frequently.
If you have an exercise book or notebook, write down the print(“Hello World”) example and label the statement and string. You may also want to note that anything (letters or numbers) can go between the speech marks and it will be displayed (printed) on the screen.
Keeping notes and examples of code will really help you when you get onto the more complicated coding tasks and can’t remember how to do something.