What does “= 0” mean in Python?

Question

I was doing an online course and when one of the lessons kind of lost me. Maybe I just don't remember it, but what does the "= 0" mean in the following program? I can't find any clue for it in my notes and the instructor doesn't explain it here.

**count = 0**
**total = 0**
inFile = open('grades.txt', 'r')
grade = inFile.readline()
while (grade):
    print(grade)
    count = count+1
    total = total + int(grade)
    grade = inFile.readline()
average = total / count
print("Average: " + str(average))

I feel like I'm forgetting something fundamental here.

Answer 1

The = operator is called the "assignment" operator. Now, plenty of people on stackoverflow are going to tell you to do your assignment yourself, but I honestly feel for you since this is such a basic question.

It's being set to 0 since later, operations like count = count + 1 require count to have a value to begin with. Adding + 1 to None doesn't work nicely, and even if it did, it's just nice when reading code to see variables declared in advance.

Answer 2

It is settings the variable value to zero

 x = 0

Means set the value of x to zero.