Solve a Debate

[Tim Chase]

> Ok the problem we had been asked a while back, to do a programming
> exercise (in college)
> That would tell you how many days there are in a month given a
> specific month.
> 
> Ok I did my like this (just pseudo):
> 
> If month = 1 or 3 or etc ....
>         noDays = 31
> Elseif month = 4 or 6 etc ....
>         noDays = 30
> Else
>         noDays = 29
> (we didn't have to take into account a leap year)
> 
> He declared an array and assigned the number of days in a month to its
> own element in an array. Now
> I realise that in this example it would not make a difference in terms
> of efficiency, but it is my belief that if
> there is more data that needed to be assigned(i.e. a couple megs of
> data) it would be simpler (and more efficient) to
> do a compare rather then assigning all that data to an array, since
> you are only going to be using 1 value and the rest
> of the data in the array is useless.
> 
> What are everyone else's thoughts on this?

Well, the standard library offers its opinion:

  >>> import calendar
  >>> calendar.mdays
  [0, 31, 28, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31]
  >>> month = 2
  >>> calendar.mdays[month]
  28

If you want the actual number of days, taking leap-years into
consideration

  >>> calendar.monthrange(2008,2)[1]
  29
  >>> calendar.monthrange(2007,2)[1]
  28

So the answer is "mu"...let Python do the work for you :)

-tkc