WEBVTT

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In terms of typing, programming languages fall into two categories,

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static languages, like C++, C# and

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Java, and Dynamic languages like JavaScript, Ruby

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and Python. In static languages, when declaring a variable

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we need to specify it's type. For example, in C#

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when declaring this variable we need to set it's type to an integer.

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So, with this the type of this variable will always be

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an integer, when we compile this program our compiler knows that students count

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is an integer, so if we accidentally try to set it to

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let's say a boolean later on the compiler will

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complain. This is how static languages work. In

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dynamic languages like JavaScript and Python, we don't have this behavior.

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So, we don't set a type when defining

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a variable, we just define a variable by setting it to a value.

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So in dynamic languages the type of the variable is determined

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at run time. Now here if you hover the mouse over

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students count you will see this is an integer, so when

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working on a large, complex program, when you want to know the type of variable

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we can simply hover your mouse over it. We also have this built in

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function called type, you can pass a variable

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or object to it, like students count, and then

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print this on the console.

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So, let's run this program. You can see this type of students count

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is a class of integer. What is this? Python

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is an object oriented language, so here we have the concept of classes,

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if you're not familiar with classes, don't worry, I'm going to talk about them in
detail

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later in the course. All I want you to know now

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is that in Python, we have a class called int that represents

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integers. So all integers are instances
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of this class. Let's take a look at a few more examples.

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So here in this interactive shell. Let's take a look at

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type of a float. Once again, it's a class called

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float. Let's look at type of a boolean

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this is also a class called

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bool. But let's look at type of a string, that's a class called

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str. So here's the takeaway. Python is

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a dynamic language, which means the type of variables are determined

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at runtime as opposed to compile time.