[Tutor] First Try

[Todd Maynard]

Nice Job John.  I made a few comments below on a few things I noticed.....

On Sunday 19 February 2006 05:33, John Connors wrote:
> G'day :)
>
> I started getting sick of reading tutorials so for a bit of a break I set
> myself the task of writing a program to pick lotto numbers, 6 numbers
> between 1 and 44 (inclusive). I had done this many years before in basic
> and I thought back then it would be a simple task but I struck a problem of
> the random number generator repeating numbers occasionally so I had to
> check each number against the other and generate another random number if
> there were duplicates.
>
> So I was prepared for the same problem with python but I found that python
> takes care of that for me so the program would only have to be one line. I
> decided to make it a little more user friendly and allow the user to pick
> home many games they want generated. Then I made the output a little easier
> to read with a few blank lines. Here is what I came up with:
>
>
> import random
>
> numberof = int(raw_input('Enter how many games you would like generated
> :')) #user input for number of games to choose

10,000 lines of code or 6months later (whichever comes first...) will you 
remember what numberof represents?   Number of times the cow jumped over the 
moon?  I try not to end a var with a prep (and will usually just omit it).  I 
would personally go for num_games_wanted or num_tickets.  (Actually to tell 
the truth I am a mixedCase kinda guy so would really go for numGamesWanted or 
numTickets, but that is not really PEP 8 [1] friendly so I am trying to break 
my ways.)

>
> print
> print
> print "Here are your numbers :"
> print
>

If you desire you can use "\n" for return to reduce this all into one line:
   print "\n\n\Here are your numbers :\n\n"
No big deal.

> for games in range(1, numberof + 1): #loop for the number of games selected
> by user
>     lotto = random.sample(xrange(1,45), 6) #generate 6 random numbers
> between 1 and 44 inclusive
>     print games, lotto
>     print
>
> else:
>     print
>     print "Hope you win!"
You don't need an else block (you will always enter it, ).

You can just do:

for games in range(1,numberof + 1):
	lotto = random.sample(xrange(1,45),6)
	print games, lotto
	print
print "\nHope you win!"

>
>
> I know this is a very simple program but... could I have done this a better
> way?

Looks pretty good to me..... If you want to expand this a little more you can 
try:

1.)  Assign all the lottery tickets to a variable and then print out the 
lottery tickets after you have them all.  ( A list would be helpful here...)

2.)  Break your program into functions so that you can do something like:

(num_tickets_wanted, min_num, max_num) = get_user_input()
lotto_tickets=generate_tickets(num_tickets_wanted, min_num,max_num)
print_results(lotto_tickets)

NOTE: It would be pure evil to drop that alll into one line.....
print_results(generate_tickets(get_user_input()))

I shouldn't have even mentioned that, but you get the idea.....
>
> John
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Search for local singles online @ Lavalife - Click here
> http://a.ninemsn.com.au/b.aspx?URL=http%3A%2F%2Flavalife9%2Eninemsn%2Ecom%2
>Eau%2Fclickthru%2Fclickthru%2Eact%3Fid%3Dninemsn%26context%3Dan99%26locale%3
>Den%5FAU%26a%3D21550&_t=21550&_r=endtext&_m=EXT
>
> _______________________________________________
> Tutor maillist  -  Tutor at python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor

Have some fun with it....at least until you win the lottery.....

--Todd Maynard

-- 
Computers are unreliable, but humans are even more unreliable.
Any system which depends on human reliability is unreliable.
		-- Gilb