Python Data Types
Chris Roda · 2024
Python creators invented the language to be fun and easy to use. A significant portion of that “easy to use” aspect comes from the language managing many of the mundane programming operations in the background away from user awareness, such as memory management and primitive data handling. The language expands continuously to meet these needs. This chapter provides a snapshot of the Python data library technical artists use on a daily basis. The five primary categories of Python data are: numeric data, sequences, dictionaries, sets and Booleans. Numeric data covers fundamental numbers: integers, floats and complex. Sequences make up the largest category of data containers, housing potentially unlimited numbers of ordered objects. Strings, tuples, lists and ranges are built-in sequences. Dictionaries are containers of un-ordered data objects referenced by hashable keys. Like dictionaries, sets contain un-ordered data components and each object must be unique. Booleans are data values with either True or False states. The chapter concludes with a procedural Houdini world building example.