While teaching my introductory course in Python, I occasionally see submissions containing the following two program lines, even before I teach about functions and modules:
if __name__ = '__main__': ... main() When I ask about it, I hear things like they got these from other instructors, or from other students who learned it from their instructors, or maybe from some on-line programming tutorial site. I'm all on board with the first of these two lines -- and I teach it myself as soon as I get to modules. My question is more about the second. Do "real" Pythonista's actually define a new function main() instead of putting the unit test right there inside the if? Or am I correct in assuming that this main() is just an artifact from people who have programmed in C, C++, or Java for so long that they cannot imagine a program without a function named "main"? I guess I'm not stuck on that habit, since my programming experiences go way back to the old Fortran days.... Roger Christman Pennsylvania State University -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
