Literals - the data in itself

Literals - the data in itself

Now that you have a little knowledge of some of the powerful features offered by the print() function, it's time to learn about some new issues, and one important new term - the literal. 

A literal is data whose values are determined by the literal itself. 

As this is a difficult concept to understand, a good example may be helpful. 

Take a look at the following set of digits: 

123

Can you guess what value it represents? Of course you can - it's one hundred twenty three

But what about this: 

c

Does it represent any value? Maybe. It can be the symbol of light, for example. It also can be the constant of integration. Or even the length of a hypotenuse in the sense of a Pythagorean theorem. There are many possibilities. 

You cannot choose the right one without some additional knowledge. 

And this is the clure: 123 is a literal, and c is not. 

You use literals to encode data and to put them into your code.  We're now going to show you some conventions you have to obery when using Python.