for examplehere' what happened when ran this script from command prompt window' command line on windows laptopto make sure it didn' have any silly typosc:\codepython script py hello world see for the full story on this processespecially if you're new to programmingwe'll get into all the gory details of writing and launching programs there for our purposes herewe've just run python script that prints string and number we probably won' win any programming awards with this codebut it' enough to capture the basics of program execution python' view the brief description in the prior section is fairly standard for scripting languagesand it' usually all that most python programmers need to know you type code into text filesand you run those files through the interpreter under the hoodthougha bit more happens when you tell python to "go although knowledge of python internals is not strictly required for python programminga basic understanding of the runtime structure of python can help you grasp the bigger picture of program execution when you instruct python to run your scriptthere are few steps that python carries out before your code actually starts crunching away specificallyit' first compiled to something called "byte codeand then routed to something called "virtual machine byte code compilation internallyand almost completely hidden from youwhen you execute program python first compiles your source code (the statements in your fileinto format known as byte code compilation is simply translation stepand byte code is lower-levelplatform-independent representation of your source code roughlypython translates each of your source statements into group of byte code instructions by decomposing them into individual steps this byte code translation is performed to speed execution --byte code can be run much more quickly than the original source code statements in your text file you'll notice that the prior paragraph said that this is almost completely hidden from you if the python process has write access on your machineit will store the byte code of your programs in files that end with pyc extension (pycmeans compiled pysourceprior to python you will see these files show up on your computer after you've run few programs alongside the corresponding source code files--that isin the same directories for instanceyou'll notice script pyc after importing script py how python runs programs