[Tutor] Design Question

[Brian van den Broek]

dsh0105 at comcast.net said unto the world upon 06/01/2007 10:46 AM:
> I think I may have sent an incomplete version of this question a moment ago (sorry). Here is the complete question:
> 
> I'm designing something along the lines of a flash card program. It's mostly just an exercise in learning Python, but I'd like it to be at least marginally usable when I'm done. So I'm looking for comments/suggestions on the key pieces of the 
> design: the questions and the flash card deck:
> Psudo-code of current design:
> 
> class Deck():
> 	"""Provides managment and informational functions about a set of questions to be asked
> 		methods incldue:
> 		__init__(questions) -- takes a list of question and creates a new deck with these questions.
> 		add_question(self,question) -- Adds a question to the current deck
> 		remove_question(self,question) -- returns True if the question was removed, False otherwise
> 		get_question() -- Returns the next unanswered question in the deck
> 		get_stats() -- returns a tuple containing: number_asked, number_correct, number_remaining
>                 shuffle_deck() -- shuffles the order of the remaining questions.
> 		Deck Overrived the __len__ function so that the len returned is the number of questions in the deck."
> 		
> 
> class Question():
> 	"""Provides questions to be asked
> 	methods:
> 	__init__(self,question,answer) -- question string representing the question. 
> 								    answer can be a text string, a tupple (for multiple correct answers)
> 									or an object implementing an is_correct() method that returns a boolean
> 									
> 	check_answer(self,answer) -- tests to see if the answer is correct and returns a boolean 
> 	"""
> 									
> 									
> Mostly I'm wondering, is this over-kill? The idea is to allow for the deck to be used for as wide a variety of purposes as possible. Also, I want to make it easy to write code that generates decks.  Is this design over-kill?
> 
> Any comments/suggestions welcome.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> David
> _______________________________________________
> Tutor maillist  -  Tutor at python.org
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>

David,

I'd make Deck and Question subclass object so as to have new-style 
classes, as in:

class Deck(object):
     # code here

If you don't know about the difference between classic classes and 
new-style, you needn't worry about it for now. There are a number of 
ways in which new-style are better, though.

I also have a suggestion that you might want to think about after you 
get the basic functionality working. When I did something similar, I 
used the pickle module make my Questions persistent between sessions, 
and had each Question keep track of how many times it has been asked 
and correctly answered. I then had my Deck.get_question pick which 
Question to ask in a way that favoured both Questions that had been 
rarely asked, and those that had the highest error rates.

Best,

Brian vdB