Diving Into Python: Chapter 5

Abhishek Jaiswal
May 30, 2015
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Hello guys!

This article is the fifth part of this series. Let's see what I have in my bag this time for you guys regarding Python.

Getting Theme

For getting the theme of Python, kindly go through my previous article:

Introduction

In this part of this article series I am explaining multiline statements and parameter passing in Python. So let's explore it one by one.

Multiline Statements

A famous quote states:

“New day, new beginning.”

Python also follows that. How?

Let me tell you, statements in Python typically end with a new line but if you feel like continuing on the same line then you can also do that using a line character called Line Continuation Character.

Structure

Productlist = prod1 + \
prod2+ \
prod3 +

Exampe

print ("Myself Abhishek a " + \
"Geek | " + \
"Student | " + \
"Philanthropist | " + \
"Painter | " + \
"Tech Evanglist")

Output

As we know, there are alternate ways of doing the same thing and so as in Python. Let's have a look how.

Example 1

Languages = [‘.NET’, ‘HTML5’, ‘AngularJS’, ‘CSS3’, ‘Python’]

Example 2

Socialnetworks = {‘Linkedin’, ‘Facebook’, ‘Twitter’, ‘Google+’, ‘MySpace’}

So, we can easily conclude from the above two examples that:

“In Python we can also use brackets like [], {}, () to continue with the same line.”

These brackets can be also defined as the continuation character (maybe something else).

Parameter Passing

There are two types of parameter passing:

Call by Value
Call By Reference

Call By Value

The most common strategy of parameter or argument passing is call-by-value, sometimes it is also called pass-by-value. This strategy is used in several programming languages, like C, C#, Java, C++ and so on.

In the call by value approach, the argument expression is evaluated first and the result of this evaluation is bound to the corresponding variable in the function. So, if the expression is a variable, a local replica of its value will be used.

Here's a functionality.

(If you didn't get the theme then don't worry, I'll explain it in details further in this article series.)

Call By Reference

In the call by reference approach, a function gets an implicit reference to the argument rather than a copy of its value. As a result, the function can modify the argument and the value of the variable in the caller's scope can be changed.

This strategy is also known as pass by reference and used in sevaral programming languages, like C, C#, Java, C++ and so on.

The advantage of call by reference is greater time and space efficiency, because arguments do not need to be copied.

Here's a sample functionality: