there fredwithout the quotesmakes sense there are more subtleties to assignment and the idea of variable being "name fora valuebut we will worry about them laterin issues with mutable objects (page they do not come up if our variables are just numbers and strings autocompletiona handy short cut idle remembers all the variables you have defined at any moment this is handy when editing without pressing entertype into the shell just windows usersthen hold down the alt key and press the key this key combination is abbreviated alt-mac usersthe windows key combination above may give you funny character (if so backspace over it in that case you need to hold down both the control key and the alt/option key when pressing the '/this may hold in other places in this tutorialwhere the alt key is called for in windows assuming you are following on the earlier variable entries to the shellyou should see autocompleted to be first this is particularly useful if you have long identifiersyou can press alt-several times if more than one identifier starts with the initial sequence of characters you typed if you press alt-again you should see fred backspace and edit so you have fiand then and press alt-again you should not see fred this timesince it does not start with fi literals and identifiers expressions like or 'helloare called literalscoming from the fact that they literally mean exactly what they say they are distinguished from variableswhose value is not directly determined by their name the sequence of characters used to form variable name (and names for other python entities lateris called an identifier it identifies python variable or other entity there are some restrictions on the character sequence that make up an identifierthe characters must all be lettersdigitsor underscores _and must start with letter in particularpunctuation and blanks are not allowed there are some words that are reserved for special use in python you may not use these words as your own identifiers they are easy to recognize in idlebecause they are automatically colored orange for the curiousyou may read the full listfalse none true and as assert async await break class continue def del elif else except finally for from global if import in is lambda nonlocal not or pass raise return try while with yield there are also identifiers that are automatically defined in pythonand that you could redefinebut you probably should not unless you really know what you are doingwhen you start the editorwe will see how idle uses color to help you know what identifies are predefined python is case sensitivethe identifiers lastlastand last are all different be sure to be consistent using the alt-auto-completion shortcut in idle helps ensure you are consistent what is legal is distinct from what is conventional or good practice or recommended meaningful names for variables are important for the humans who are looking at programsunderstanding themand revising them that sometimes means you would like to use name that is more than one word longlike price at openingbut blanks are beginning with python