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3. Built-in Types

The following sections describe the standard types that are built into the interpreter. Note: Historically (until release 2.2), Python's built-in types have differed from user-defined types because it was not possible to use the built-in types as the basis for object-oriented inheritance. This limitation does not exist any longer.

The principal built-in types are numerics, sequences, mappings, files, classes, instances and exceptions.

Some operations are supported by several object types; in particular, practically all objects can be compared, tested for truth value, and converted to a string (with the `repr()` function or the slightly different `str()` function). The latter function is implicitly used when an object is written by the `print` statement. (Information on the `print` statement and other language statements can be found in the Python Reference Manual and the Python Tutorial.)