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Assignments in Python are handled with the assignment operator, which is the Equal sign.

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Let's go ahead and make a working copy of syntax.py.

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I'll call it syntax-working.py.

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And we'll open that working copy, and we'll go ahead and create an assignment.

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So I'll have a variable called a, and I will assign it the value 1.

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Now what this does in Python is it actually defines the variable a, and it

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creates an integer type variable, and it puts the value 1 in it.

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And so in the print statement, I can print a.

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And if I go ahead and save this and run it, we'll see that we get the value 1 printed.

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If instead I were to put a string there, say "one" spelled out, run that then

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we get a one here.

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We can look at the type of the variable that was created by using the type function.

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And so this will print the type and the value.

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Save that and run it.

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See that that's a Class String, it's the type.

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In fact everything in Python is an object, and objects have classes, and so the

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type of a thing is typically the name of the class.

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And so if I make this a number again and save that and run it, we'll see that we

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get a variable of the <class 'int'>.

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So if a variable has not been assigned before, then the assignment operator

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actually creates the object.

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And it creates it of the appropriate type, or the appropriate class.

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You can assign multiple objects at the same time. You can say a, b = 0, 1, and

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then if I print(a, b), then I'll get both of those values, the 0 and the 1.

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Interestingly, you can even do something like this, where you're actually

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swapping these values.

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You can use the same variables on the right and the left-hand side of the Equal

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sign, and you can pretty much do this safely under most circumstances.

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So here we'll get a 1 and 0 when we run this, 1, 0.

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There are some types of objects in Python that are sets of values, or sequences

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of values, called lists, and tuples, and things like that.

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For example, if we say a = (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), by putting them in the parentheses,

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this makes this into a tuple.

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And if we save this and run it, you see that we get all of those values.

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Now, when you use print on an aggregate type, on a set, or a tuple, or something

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like that, it actually tries to print it in a form that would be acceptable

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syntax in Python for creating that object.

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And so for example, another aggregate type is the list, which has square brackets.

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And if I define it like that, then the print statement will print it like that.

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So the assignment operator is used for assigning a value in Python,

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and it will also create an object if that object has not already been created.