On Mar 24, 11:08 pm, Tim Leslie <tim.les...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 25 March 2011 13:51, scattered <tooscatte...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Here is another possibility: you are using Python *interactively* in
> > solving cryptograms (as a matter of fact - I was doing exactly this
> > yesterday in trying to solve some Playfair ciphers). You have a
> > ciphertext that is a stream of letters in the range A...Z. You need to
> > consult frequencies of letters, pairs of letters, triples of letters,
> > and quadruples of letters that occur. So, you write a script that
> > steps through the cipher text, creates a dictionary which records
> > frequencies of strings of length <= 4, and, as an added convienence,
> > creates bindings of frequencies to these strings. Thus - if you want
> > to know how often, say, EFW occurs in the ciphertext you just type EFW
> > (rather than freq["EFW"])
>
> And what happens when you want to know the frequency of "if", "def",
> "for" or any other variable which matches a keyword?
>
> Tim
>>> IF = 3
>>> if IF > 1: print("No problem")
>>> 'No problem'
In a *program* such things are silly - for interactive use where you
have motivation to have a family of pre-defined bindings available for
possible use, it is perfectly ok. If Python *did* have an upper-case
keyword (does it? I couldn't think of any), e.g. NULL, then of course
you could write your script to check for that, and for those special
cases (which are unlikely to occur as substrings of a cipher text) you
could make the binding to something like fNULL instead.
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