2.3 Built-in Types
The following sections describe the standard types that are built into the interpreter. Historically, Python's built-in types have differed from user-defined types because it was not possible to use the built-in types as the basis for object-oriented inheritance. With the 2.2 release this situation has started to change, although the intended unification of user-defined and built-in types is as yet far from complete.
The principal built-in types are numerics, sequences, mappings, files classes, instances and exceptions.
Some operations are supported by several object types; in particular,
practically all objects can be compared, tested for truth value,
and converted to a string (with the ` ...` notation,
the equivalent repr() function, or the slightly different
str() function). The latter
function is implicitly used when an object is written by the
print statement.
(Information on print statement
and other language statements can be found in the
Python Reference Manual and the
Python Tutorial.)
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Release 2.4.1, documentation updated on 30 March 2005.