Question

My editor (TextMate) shows id in another colour (when used as variable name) than my usual variable names. Is it a keyword? I don’t want to shade any keyword…

Answer 1

id is not a keyword in Python, but it is the name of a built-in function.

The keywords are:

and       del       from      not       while
as        elif      global    or        with
assert    else      if        pass      yield
break     except    import    print
class     exec      in        raise
continue  finally   is        return
def       for       lambda    try

Keywords are invalid variable names. The following would be a syntax error:

if = 1

On the other hand, built-in functions like id or type or str can be shadowed:

str = "hello"    # don't do this