You might have noticed that in my example code I use white spaces a lot. For instance, for parentheses attached to functions, I almost always have a white space after the opening parenthesis and before the closing parenthesis. In calculations, I often have white spaces around operators if that makes the calculations better readable. I also often insert empty lines in my code to make it more readable, and consistently use four spaces as indentations.

Most of these things are just “style.” The white spaces next to the parentheses and around operators are not necessary, Python understands the code just as well when they are gone. These four statements are all equivalent:

# All equivalent statements
print( 2 + 3 )
print(2+3)
print( 2+3)
print       (       2       +       3       )

Attaching the opening parenthesis to a function is something that almost every programmer does, but for the rest, styles of placing white spaces differ between programmers (my style of placing a space before the closing parenthesis is rare). You can choose your own style in this respect, you do not need to follow mine. But I recommend that you use your chosen style consistently, which will make your code more readable even for programmers who use a different style.

Note that in the code above there is a hash mark (#) on the first line, with a text after that which explains some details of the code. The line with the hash mark is a comment line: whenever you put a hash mark in your code (except when it is within a string, of course), everything to the right of the hash mark for the remainder of the line is commentary, which Python ignores. You can use comments to clarify your code, if such clarification is needed. More details on providing comments to code I will give in a later chapter.