1.10. The building blocks of programs

In the next few chapters, we will learn more about the vocabulary, sentence structure, paragraph structure, and story structure of Python. We will learn about the powerful capabilities of Python and how to compose those capabilities together to create useful programs.

There are some low-level conceptual patterns that we use to construct programs. These constructs are not just for Python programs, they are part of every programming language from machine language up to the high-level languages.

It sounds almost too simple to be true, and of course it is never so simple. It is like saying that walking is simply “putting one foot in front of the other”. The “art” of writing a program is composing and weaving these basic elements together many times over to produce something that is useful to its users.

The word counting program from the previous section directly uses all of these patterns except for one.

You have attempted of activities on this page