Beginners Query - Simple counter problem

[David Barr]

Scott David Daniels wrote:
> David Barr wrote:
>> I am brand new to Python (this is my second day), and the only 
>> experience I have with programming was with VBA.  Anyway, I'm posting 
>> this to see if anyone would be kind enough to help me with this (I 
>> suspect, very easy to solve) query.
>>
>> The following code is in a file which I am running through the 
>> interpreter with the execfile command, yet it yeilds no results.  I 
>> appreciate I am obviously doing something really stupid here, but I 
>> can't find it.  Any help appreciated.
>>
>>
>> def d6(i):
>>     roll = 0
>>     count = 0
>>     while count <= i:
>>         roll = roll + random.randint(1,6)
>>         count += 1
>>
>>     return roll
>>
>> print d6(3)
> A) your direct answer: by using <=, you are rolling 4 dice, not 3.
> B) Much more pythonic:
> 
> import random
> 
> def d6(count):
>     result = 0
>     for die in range(count):
>         result += random.randint(1, 6)
>     return result
> 
> -Scott David Daniels
> Scott.Daniels at Acm.Org

I was surprised by the speed and number of posts.  Thanks for the 
solutions provided!

 >>> def roll(times=1, sides=6):
...     return random.randint(times, times*sides)

Although this would probably be quicker than the other approaches, I'm 
not using the dice to generate numbers per say, I actually want to 
emulate the rolling of dice, bell-curve (normal distribution) as well as 
the range.

Thanks again, I already like what (very) little I can do in Python and 
it seems to have a great community too.

Cheers,
Dave.