venture of iit bombay vjti alumni the pythonpath is an environment variableconsisting of list of directories the syntax of pythonpath is the same as that of the shell variable path here is typical pythonpath from windows system set pythonpath :\python \liband here is typical pythonpath from unix system set pythonpath /usr/local/lib/python namespaces and scoping variables are names (identifiersthat map to objects namespace is dictionary of variable names (keysand their corresponding objects (valuesa python statement can access variables in local namespace and in the global namespace if local and global variable have the same namethe local variable shadows the global variable each function has its own local namespace class methods follow the same scoping rule as ordinary functions python makes educated guesses on whether variables are local or global it assumes that any variable assigned value in function is local thereforein order to assign value to global variable within functionyou must first use the global statement