Python: What is a header?

Question

I'm new to Python and programming in general. I am taking a module at university which requires me to write some fairly basic programs in Python. However, I got this feedback on my last assignment:

There should be a header block containing the file name, author name, date created, date modified and python version

What is a header block? Is it just comments at the top of your code or is it be something which prints when the program runs? Or something else?

Answer 1

There's thing called Docstring in python (and here're some conventions on how to write python code in general - PEP 8) escaped by either triple single quote ''' or triple double quote """ well suited for multiline comments:

'''
    File name: test.py
    Author: Peter Test
    Date created: 4/20/2013
    Date last modified: 4/25/2013
    Python Version: 2.7
'''

You also may used special variables later (when programming a module) that are dedicated to contain info as:

__author__ = "Rob Knight, Gavin Huttley, and Peter Maxwell"
__copyright__ = "Copyright 2007, The Cogent Project"
__credits__ = ["Rob Knight", "Peter Maxwell", "Gavin Huttley",
                    "Matthew Wakefield"]
__license__ = "GPL"
__version__ = "1.0.1"
__maintainer__ = "Rob Knight"
__email__ = "[email protected]"
__status__ = "Production"

More details in answer here.