Creating a Program to Decompose a Number and Run a Function on that Decomposition

[CTSB01]

On Thursday, July 18, 2013 10:48:23 PM UTC-4, Fábio Santos wrote:
> On 19 Jul 2013 03:24, "CTSB01" <scott.m... at gmail.com> wrote:
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> > Thanks for the alternative links, I'll use gmane.org as an access point next time.
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> > > Don't paraphrase.  Just copy/paste it into your email message.  And I'm
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> > > assuming you know to run things from the terminal window, and not from
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> > > IDLE or something else that messes up the error messages.  Your comment
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> > > about 'orange' doesn't sound promising.
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> > > As Ian pointed out, you have no return value in this function.  You
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> > > calculate something called 'rtn', but never use it.  The last line
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> > > accomplishes nothing, since rtn is neither assigned nor returned, nor
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> > > passed nor...   You probably wanted:
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> > >        return  rtn
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> > Does something like
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> > def phi_m(x, m):
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> >           rtn = []
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> >           for n2 in range(0, len(x) * m - 2):
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> >             n = n2 / m
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> >             r = n2 - n * m
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> >             rtn.append(m * x[n] + r * (x[n + 1] - x[n]))
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> >             print ('n2 =', n2, ': n =', n, ' r =' , r, ' rtn =', rtn)
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> >           return rtn
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> > look right?
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> > It doesn't seem to have any errors.  However, I do receive the following error when trying to implement an x after having defined phi:
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> > >>> x = [0, 1, 1, 2, 3]
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> > >>> phi_m(x, 2)
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> > Traceback (most recent call last):
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> >   File "<pyshell#6>", line 1, in <module>
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> >     phi_m(x, 2)
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> >   File "<pyshell#2>", line 6, in phi_m
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> >     rtn.append(m * x[n] + r * (x[n + 1] - x[n]))
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> > TypeError: list indices must be integers, not float
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> When you think about it, it makes sense. If you have a list, say,
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> [2, 5, 1]
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> You can say, I want the first item (0) or the third item(2) but never, the one-and-a-halfeth (0.5) item. Python only accepts integer values when accessing list items.
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> To access list items, convert your index into an integer value.

Thanks Fabio.  Is there a statement that lets me specify that I only need it to take the integer values?