Neal wrote: > I'm doing the MIT OpenCourseWare class that this assignment hails from > and I don't doubt that its a relatively common assignment. Upon > searching for it for some ideas of why my program wouldn't work one of > the top results is this a thread from this group full of derision and > sarcasm. Believe me I understand that the people here don't want to do > another person's homework but for someone who isn't going to be coding > for a living or is a hobbyist like I am, there could be some useful > information. Eventually I figured out what I was doing wrong, and I > was hoping to add some insight. At this point in the lectures about > all we've learned to deal with as far as commands are: while, if, > else, elif and some boolean operators.
I'd like to bring your attention to my contribution to the above-mentioned thread. http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2009-November/1226626.html I posted it late in the thread's life because like you I disliked the direction the "discussion" was taking. My answer is not so much about an efficient solution to the actual problem, but more about how to approach a programming problem that initially seems to be over your head. As a long time reader I can confirm that if you show that you have made a minimum effort to solve even "homeworky" problems you usually get constructive hints on comp.lang.python. There is also a mailing list http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor for the absolute beginner. Peter -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
