Question

I am in the process of learning Python and I have reached the section about the pass statement. The guide I’m using defines it as being a null statement that is commonly used as a placeholder.

I still don’t fully understand what that means though. What would be a simple/basic situation where the pass statement would be used and why would it be needed?

Answer 1

Suppose you are designing a new class with some methods that you don’t want to implement, yet.

class MyClass(object):
    def meth_a(self):
        pass

    def meth_b(self):
        print "I'm meth_b"

If you were to leave out the pass, the code wouldn’t run.

You would then get an:

IndentationError: expected an indented block

To summarize, the pass statement does nothing particular, but it can act as a placeholder, as demonstrated here.