A common error (not too serious) that I see in
beginning Python (and no doubt other languages,
but Python is the one I'm teaching), is having a
while condition that appears to put a lid on things,
but then the flow all leaks away through break
statements, such that the front door condition
is
Kirby,
There are some nice thoughts here that I don't really disagree with, but your
code examples don't use the while conditions well. If you put a condition on
the loop, there should be no reason to retest the same condition inside the
loop. Think of the loop condition as a guard, inside the
Oops, I think I have an off by one error in my last example. I would change the
conditional at the bottom to:
if guess == secret:
print(You guessed it!)
else:
print(You maxed out.)
That's clearer anyway.
John Zelle, PhD
Professor of Computer Science
Wartburg College
Can someone please explain why
n = 5000
lst = [i for i in range(n)] # or xrange(n) in Python 2
crashes with MemoryError on a 32-bit system, while
n = 5000
lst = n*[0]
for i in range(n): # or xrange(n) in Python 2
lst[i] = i
works?
Thanks,
Gary Litvin
www.skylit.com
I always teach my kids about sentinel loops. I have them avoid breaking loops
at all costs! What about do loop untils?
--
Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
John Zelle john.ze...@wartburg.edu wrote:
Oops, I think I have an off by one error in my last example. I
No problem with Python 2.7.3 on a MacBookPro with 2GB memory and a light load
of other programs. Could it be dependent on how much memory you have
available?
There might be slight differences in the memory consumption in computing the
two different forms. I would guess the second form
On Sat, Apr 21, 2012 at 6:11 AM, John Zelle john.ze...@wartburg.edu wrote:
Kirby,
There are some nice thoughts here that I don't really disagree with, but your
code examples don't use the while conditions well. If you put a condition on
the loop, there should be no reason to retest the same
... another useful contribution to this thread.
-- Forwarded message --
From: Richard Pattis pat...@ics.uci.edu
Date: Sat, Apr 21, 2012 at 6:53 PM
Subject: I'm not allowed to post
To: kirby urner kirby.ur...@gmail.com
Feel free to post this for me, which got returned. Probably
Hi All,
Interesting thread. Sorry about the extraneous parentheses in my initial post,
I've just come off a semester of Java and am reflexively putting parentheses
around my conditions.
One last thought. While I sometimes use the infinite loop form (while True:) I
think the explicit loop
