The English word "literal" comes from the Latin word for "letter".

A literal is an expressly written entity.

A literal value literally expresses a value.

The word "entity" is a nice way to say "thing" or "something".

The word entity means thing, as in an instance of something such as an object. A computer string is a sequence of entities.


A computer string is not part of a rope.

A string is a sequence of entities of the same type.

• A bit string is a sequence of bits.
• A byte string is a sequence of bytes.
• A character string is a sequence of characters.

When not specified, the word string usually means a text string or sequence of characters.

The English word "delimit" means to mark the boundaries.

Double quote characters, ASCII #34, are used to delimit (the boundaries) of a string literal.

Single quote characters, ASCII #39, are used to delimit (the boundaries) of a character literal.

A (character) string is made up of zero or more characters. An empty string has no characters.

• String literals are delimited by the double quote character.
• Character literals are single characters delimited by single quote characters.

Note: Python has some other ways of delimiting strings (not covered here). So a string literal is zero or more characters delimited by the double quote character while a character literal is exactly one character delimited by the single quote character.

An integer is a number without a fractional part.

A number, with an optional fractional part, represents an approximation to a mathematical real number.

Such numbers are called floating point approximations, or, for short, a float.

If a literal is to represent or be computed with an integer, write it as an integer literal.

If a literal is to represent or be computed with a float/double, write it as a float/double literal by including the decimal point.

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