Book Image

Dancing with Python

By : Robert S. Sutor
Book Image

Dancing with Python

By: Robert S. Sutor

Overview of this book

Dancing with Python helps you learn Python and quantum computing in a practical way. It will help you explore how to work with numbers, strings, collections, iterators, and files. The book goes beyond functions and classes and teaches you to use Python and Qiskit to create gates and circuits for classical and quantum computing. Learn how quantum extends traditional techniques using the Grover Search Algorithm and the code that implements it. Dive into some advanced and widely used applications of Python and revisit strings with more sophisticated tools, such as regular expressions and basic natural language processing (NLP). The final chapters introduce you to data analysis, visualizations, and supervised and unsupervised machine learning. By the end of the book, you will be proficient in programming the latest and most powerful quantum computers, the Pythonic way.
Table of Contents (29 chapters)
2
Part I: Getting to Know Python
10
PART II: Algorithms and Circuits
14
PART III: Advanced Features and Libraries
19
References
20
Other Books You May Enjoy
Appendices
Appendix C: The Complete UniPoly Class
Appendix D: The Complete Guitar Class Hierarchy
Appendix F: Production Notes

A.6 The Python interpreter

The Python interpreter is a classic example of a command-line-driven Read-Evaluate-Print-Loop (REPL).

Figure A.1 shows how I start Python from the operating system command line.

The Python interpreter
Figure A.1: The Python interpreter

After displaying version information, Python displays a “>>>” prompt. I enter the first command: 2 + 3.

  • Python reads 2 + 3 and parses it into an internal data structure it can manipulate.
  • It then determines that it must evaluate the expression by applying “+” to int 2 and int 3. It does so and produces the result 5.
  • Since the result is not None, Python prints 5.
  • It then displays another “>>>” and waits for input.

The next expression is import math. Python reads and evaluates this code and loads the math...