Hi Tom,
You can see what happens for yourself in the Pythontutor: http://goo.gl/YVkh03 - step through the code by clicking on "Forward" and see what happens. You are calling the howMany function from inside the function itself, which is called recursion. This can be practical, but in your case it isn't. In other langauges, the function would call itself until you run out of memory, but in Python there is an (adjustable) limit to the number of recursion that can be executed, before the error occurs that you describe. One simple rewrite of your function that counts alle elements of all lists in the dictionary (I am not sur if that's what you want, but I guess you can figure out what you need from the example) is this: http://goo.gl/frZfkc animals = { 'a': ['aardvark'], 'b': ['baboon'], 'c': ['coati']} x = animals['a'] def how_many(aDict): count = 0 for value in animals.values(): count += len(value) return count print(how_many(x)) (hope the pasted code is not mangled ...) cheers Oliver On Sat, 9 Apr 2016 at 00:52 Tom Maher <tomjmah...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi, > > As a test I am trying to write a function that returns the sum of values > attached to one key in a dictionary. I am wondering why the code that I > wrote is returning: > "maximum recursion depth exceeded " > Here is the code: > > animals = { 'a': ['aardvark'], 'b': ['baboon'], 'c': ['coati']} > > x = animals['a'] > > def howMany(aDict): > > count = 0 > > for value in howMany(aDict): > > count += 1 > > return count > > howMany(x) > > > Just wondering why I would be getting that error. > > > Thanks > _______________________________________________ > Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org > To unsubscribe or change subscription options: > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor > _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
