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edu-sig@python.org

July 2008

24 participants
22 discussions

Re: [Edu-sig] Suggestion for python learning
by deepu john July 10, 2008

July 10, 2008

Hello, # Had this email sent earlier, which got trapped by the spam filter as I was not a member of edu-sig. I have a wish and / a suggestion which I hope will help newbies/noobies deal with the learning curve of python. I have a background in one of the biological sciences and had always wanted to learn programming to do useful things in my profession. I learnt more concepts about programming in the past few months using python than any other programming language I tried to learn in the past. (VB.NET often DIMmed my hope of useful programming and a cup of java often only made me PUBLICally VOID after listening to programming STATIC (er... noise). :). I am pretty amazed by what I can do with python just with what I have learnt so far. Listening to some podcasts like the python 411 gives us newbies good highlights about some features of this language. Some discussions like - about threads, pygame, simpy, are simply just exciting to listen to. Wished there was an audiobook by some python expert discussing and high lighting concepts in programming using python. Since python is basically "Executable pseudocode", why not someone create an audio book about the basics of this language? Or at-least a companion to an already existing book or yet to be published book, so that newbies like us can get the highlights of what is to be expected when we sit down at the computer and try out the code. It would have been extremely useful to have an audiobook about python which one can listen to while sitting in a tram, waiting at a doctors office, walking on the treadmill, driving a car.... The same topics that will take about an hour to read through in a book can be listened through in 10 or 15 minutes. Hope someone will do it soon, that then python would become the only programming language that can be learnt by listening! Thanks for listening :Deepu John

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Mystery Number 6174
by kirby urner July 7, 2008

July 7, 2008

Yutaka Nishiyama has this interesting article in the March 2006 issue of Plus, entitled 'Mysterious number 6174'. The theorem in this article is as follows: any 4-digit positive integer, stipulating all 4 digits *not* be the same one, may be distilled to 6174 by the following process: extract the largest and smallest two integers from the 4 digits and subtract the smaller from the larger, and repeat as necessary. >>> funtopic.converge() 2283: 8322 - 2238 == 6084 6084: 8640 - 0468 == 8172 8172: 8721 - 1278 == 7443 7443: 7443 - 3447 == 3996 3996: 9963 - 3699 == 6264 6264: 6642 - 2466 == 4176 4176: 7641 - 1467 == 6174 >>> funtopic.converge() 9822: 9822 - 2289 == 7533 7533: 7533 - 3357 == 4176 4176: 7641 - 1467 == 6174 >>> funtopic.converge() 6685: 8665 - 5668 == 2997 2997: 9972 - 2799 == 7173 7173: 7731 - 1377 == 6354 6354: 6543 - 3456 == 3087 3087: 8730 - 0378 == 8352 8352: 8532 - 2358 == 6174 Here's one way to test the result. Think of a different way? def somenum(n = 4): digits = range(10) ans = [] good = False # no exit pass (yet) while True: for i in range(n): ans.append(choice(digits)) # pick any n digits firstdigit = ans[0] # not much chance all digits the same # compare first to rest, pass test on first # exception for i in range(1,n+1): if firstdigit != ans[i]: good = True # exit pass break if good: break # has exit pass return "".join([str(i) for i in ans]) def converge(closer = 6174): ournum = somenum() while True: smallest = sorted(list(ournum)) highest = reversed(smallest) strhi, strlo = "".join(highest), "".join(smallest) diff = int(strhi) - int(strlo) print( "%s: %s - %s == %s" % (ournum, strhi, strlo, diff) ) if diff == closer: return ournum = str(diff) Kirby Related reading: http://controlroom.blogspot.com/2007/01/aguirre-wrath-of-god-movie-review.h…

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