integers (positive and negative whole numbersusing the int typeand it represents strings (sequences of unicode charactersusing the str type here are some examples of integer and string literals- "infinitely demanding'simon critchley'positively abg /( )'incidentallythe second number shown is --the size of python' integers is limited only by machine memorynot by fixed number of bytes strings can be delimited by double or single quotesas long as the same kind are used at both endsand since python uses unicodestrings are not limited to ascii charactersas the penultimate string shows an empty string is simply one with nothing between the delimiters python uses square brackets ([]to access an item from sequence such as string for exampleif we are in python shell (either in the interactive interpreteror in idlewe can enter the following--the python shell' output is shown in lightfacewhat you type is shown in bold"hard times"[ ' "giraffe"[ 'gtraditionallypython shells use as their promptalthough this can be changed the square brackets syntax can be used with data items of any data type that is sequencesuch as strings and lists this consistency of syntax is one of the reasons that python is so beautiful note that all python index positions start at in pythonboth str and the basic numeric types such as int are immutable--that isonce settheir value cannot be changed at first this appears to be rather strange limitationbut python' syntax means that this is nonissue in practice the only reason for mentioning it is that although we can use square brackets to retrieve the character at given index position in stringwe cannot use them to set new character (note that in python character is simply string of length to convert data item from one type to another we can use the syntax datatype(itemfor exampleint(" "