another puzzled newbie

[Peter Otten]

Elaine,

it is always a good idea to post the exact error message (cut and paste),
(even if it is not particulary helpful in this case) and a short abstract
of what your posted piece of code is supposed to do. What I could find out
so far:

You have forgotten the last ] in the first line of singlePass():

postshuffled += [preshuffled[shuffler[0]]]

By the way, open (, [ or { lead Python to assume that the following lines
are also part of the list, tuple, dictionary or function call, which often
causes misleading error messages.

Hope that helps, 
Peter