Comparison with False - something I don't understand

[Tim Harig]

On 2010-12-05, Paul Rubin <no.email at nospam.invalid> wrote:
> Tim Harig <usernet at ilthio.net> writes:
>> A friend was trying to derive a mathematical formula for determining
>> the possibly distribution of results from rolling arbitrariy numbers
>> of m n-sided dice
>
>     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multinomial_distribution

I sure he rediscovered much of that.  Working that out for himeself was
probably far more educational then simply reading an article on the
solution.

>> To generate a listing of all (non-uniq) possible roles, I would call
>> the first dices increment method read and read the dice faces into a
>> log until the first dice threw an exception that it could not be
>> further incremented.  Then I would call reset() on the first dice and
>> increment the second and so on much like the odometer of a car.
>
>     from itertools import product
>     m, n = 5, 2
>     for roll in product(*(xrange(1,m+1) for i in xrange(n))):
>        print roll

The fact that I bothered to create classes for the dice and roles, rather
then simply iterating over a list of numbers,  should tell you that I
produced was of a far more flexible nature; including the support for
roles with dice having different numbers of sides.  I basically created
a DSL that he could use to generate and automatically calculate the
properties of series of roles defined by one or more varying property.

I merely posted a simplied description of the dice-role objects because I
thought that it demonstrated how exceptions can provide eligance of control
for situations that don't involve what would traditionally be defined as an
error.