3. Built-in Constants

A small number of constants live in the built-in namespace. They are:

False

The false value of the bool type. Assignments to False are illegal and raise a SyntaxError.

True

The true value of the bool type. Assignments to True are illegal and raise a SyntaxError.

None

The sole value of types.NoneType. None is frequently used to represent the absence of a value, as when default arguments are not passed to a function. Assignments to None are illegal and raise a SyntaxError.

NotImplemented

Special value which can be returned by the “rich comparison” special methods (__eq__(), __lt__(), and friends), to indicate that the comparison is not implemented with respect to the other type.

Ellipsis

The same as .... Special value used mostly in conjunction with extended slicing syntax for user-defined container data types.

__debug__

This constant is true if Python was not started with an -O option. See also the assert statement.

Note

The names None, False, True and __debug__ cannot be reassigned (assignments to them, even as an attribute name, raise SyntaxError), so they can be considered “true” constants.

3.1. Constants added by the site module

The site module (which is imported automatically during startup, except if the -S command-line option is given) adds several constants to the built-in namespace. They are useful for the interactive interpreter shell and should not be used in programs.

quit(code=None)

exit(code=None)

Objects that when printed, print a message like “Use quit() or Ctrl-D (i.e. EOF) to exit”, and when called, raise SystemExit with the specified exit code.

copyright

license

credits

Objects that when printed, print a message like “Type license() to see the full license text”, and when called, display the corresponding text in a pager-like fashion (one screen at a time).