rapid introduction to procedural programming figure idle' python shell prompts but idle is much easier to useso we recommend using idle for experimenting with code snippets the short interactive examples we show are all assumed to be entered in an interactive python interpreter or in idle' python shell we now know how to create and run python programsbut clearly we won' get very far knowing only single function in the next section we will considerably increase our python knowledge this will make us able to create short but useful python programssomething we will do in this last section python' "beautiful heart||in this section we will learn about eight key pieces of pythonand in the next section we will show how these pieces can be used to write couple of small but realistic programs there is much more to say about all of the things covered in this sectionso if as you read it you feel that python is missing something or that things are sometimes done in long-winded waypeek ahead using the forward references or using the table of contents or indexand you will almost certainly find that python has the feature you want and often has more concise forms of expression than we show here--and lot more besides piece # data types |one fundamental thing that any programming language must be able to do is represent items of data python provides several built-in data typesbut we will concern ourselves with only two of them for now python represents