[Tutor] need help

[Jeff Shannon]

Hi Valeri,

I'm sending this back to the mailing list as well.  It's usually a 
good idea to keep discussions like this on the list (you can just hit 
'reply all' instead of 'reply' in your mail program to do this), for a 
couple of reasons.  One is that I might not be available right away -- 
if, for example, I'd left on vacation just after replying to your 
message, you could've been waiting for a long time for a response from 
me.  On the other hand, if you sent it to the list, you'd have a whole 
lot of people who're just as capable of helping you as I am.  The 
other reason is that somebody else may benefit from seeing the 
question and answer -- much of what I know about Python, I've picked 
up from following discussions between other people, so I really like 
the idea of keeping these discussions where anyone can see them.  :)

valeri wrote:
> Hi Jeff!
> Thank you for trying to help.Here is what I enter in my Python  IDLE on
> windows xp home edition using livewires 2.0 tutorial pack:
> 
>>>if 1 < 2:
>>
>      print 'Something is wrong!'
>      else:
> 
> When I press <enter> after 'else' the 'else' is highlighted in red, and
> there is a "SyntaxError:invalid syntax" message.

The problem here is that the 'else' needs to be at the same 
indentation level as the 'if' statement that it matches --

if 1 < 2:
     print 'Yes, one *is* less than two.'
else:
     print 'Something strange going on here...'

Python uses indentation to determine program structure, and code 
that's at the same indentation level is considered to be a single 
block.  In this case, 'else' should be part of the if statement, and 
not part of the block that's only run when the if statement evaluates 
to true.

Hope that this helps make sense of the problem.  If you have any 
further questions or problems, don't hesitate to ask again!

Jeff Shannon
Technician/Programmer
Credit International