The reprt function is used to obtain a canonical string representation of the object. Backticks (also called conversion or reverse quotes) do the same thing. Note that you will have eval(repr(object)) == object most of the time.
>>> i = []
>>> i.append('item') >>> `i`
"['item']"
>>> repr(i)
"['item']"
Basically, the repr function or the backticks are used to obtain a printable representation of the object. you can control what your objects return for therepr function by defining the__repr__ method in your class.