Python for Everyone: The PreTeXt Interactive Edition

At this point, the syntax error you are most likely to make is an illegal variable name, like class and yield, which are keywords, or odd~job and US$, which contain illegal characters.

If you put a space in a variable name, Python thinks it is two operands without an operator:

For syntax errors, the error messages don't help much. The most common messages are SyntaxError: invalid syntax and SyntaxError: invalid token, neither of which is very informative.

The runtime error you are most likely to make is a “use before def;” that is, trying to use a variable before you have assigned a value. This can happen if you spell a variable name wrong:

Variables names are case sensitive, so LaTeX is not the same as latex.

At this point, the most likely cause of a semantic error is the order of operations. For example, to evaluate \(1 \over {2\pi }\) (which is .159), you might be tempted to write

But the division happens first, so you would get \(\pi \over 2\text{,}\) which is not the same thing! There is no way for Python to know what you meant to write, so in this case you don't get an error message; you just get the wrong answer. Try adding parentheses to the code above to return the correct answer.