Syntactic Sugar: Why Python Is Sweet and Pythonic

Python has several pieces of syntax that are syntactic sugar. This sugar is syntax that isn’t strictly necessary but gives Python some of its flavor as a readable, beginner-friendly, and powerful language. In this tutorial, you’ll explore some of Python’s most used pieces of syntactic sugar.

In practice, you already use most of these pieces of syntax, as they include many well-known Pythonic constructs. As you read on, you’ll see how Python works under the hood and learn how to use the language efficiently and securely.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn:

• What syntactic sugar is
• How syntactic sugar applies to operators
• How assignment expressions are syntactic sugar
• How for loops and comprehensions are syntactic sugar
• How other Python constructs are also syntactic sugar

To get the most out of this tutorial, you should be familiar with the basics of Python, including operators, expressions, loops, decorators, classes, context managers, and more.

Take the Quiz: Test your knowledge with our interactive “Syntactic Sugar: Why Python Is Sweet and Pythonic” quiz. You’ll receive a score upon completion to help you track your learning progress:

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Interactive Quiz

Syntactic Sugar: Why Python Is Sweet and Pythonic

You can take this quiz to test your understanding of Python's most common pieces of syntactic sugar and how they make your code more Pythonic and readable.

Syntactic Sugar

In programming, syntactic sugar refers to pieces of syntax that simplify the code and make it more readable or concise. Syntactic sugar lets you express things in a clearer and more readable way.

It makes the language sweeter for human use: things can be expressed more clearly, more concisely, or in an alternative style that some may prefer. (Source)

However, syntactic sugar is something that you may not need in practice because you can get the same result using a different, and often more involved, construct.

Python has many pieces of syntactic sugar that you’ll regularly use in your code. These syntax constructs make Python more readable, quicker to write, and user-friendly. Understanding these syntactic sugar pieces and their significance will help you better understand the inner workings of Python.

In rare situations, you’ll find that desugared versions of a given piece of syntactic sugar can better fulfill your needs. So, knowing about the alternative code to a given sugar can be a good skill to have.

Operators in Python

As with most programming languages, Python makes extensive use of operators. You’ll find several categories of operators, including arithmetic, assignment, augmented assignment, comparison, Boolean, and membership operators. All these operators are part of Python’s syntactic sugar constructs because they let you write expressions in a quick and readable way.

For example, arithmetic operators allow you to create math expressions that are quick to write and read because they look pretty similar to what you learned in math class:

>>> 5 + 7
12

>>> 10 - 4
6

>>> 2 * 4
8

>>> 20 / 2
10

In the first example, you use the plus operator (+) to add two numbers. In the second example, you use the subtraction operator (-) to subtract two numbers. The final two examples perform multiplication and division.

Python supports its arithmetic operators through special methods. Here’s a quick summary:

What does it mean to say Python supports its operators through special methods? It means that every time you use an operator, Python calls the corresponding special method under the hood.

To illustrate, here’s how you can express the arithmetic operations you wrote earlier using the appropriate special methods: