[Tutor] Help with simple text book example that doesn't work!!!

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 4 Apr 2010 03:40:57 pm Brian Drwecki wrote:
> Hi all... I am working from the Learning Python 3rd edition published
> by O'Reily... FYI I am trying to learn Python on my own (not for
> course credit or anything).. I am a psychologist with very limited
> programming experience.. I am anal, and this example code doesn't
> work.. I am using IDLE to do everything (ni ni ni ni ni)
>
> So here is the code the book give me..
>
> while True:
>     reply = raw_input('Enter text:')
>     if reply == 'stop':
>         break
>     elif not reply.isdigit(  ):
>         print 'Bad!' * 8
>     else:
>         print int(reply) ** 2
> print 'Bye'
>
>
> Idle gives me this error  SyntaxError: invalid syntax (it highlights
> the word print in the print 'bye' line..

Please do an exact copy and paste of the error and post it, rather than 
paraphrasing the error.

In the meantime, a couple of guesses...

Are you sure you are using Python 2.6? If you are using 3.1, that would 
explain the failure. In Python 3, print stopped being a statement and 
became an ordinary function that requires parentheses.

In Python 2.6, one way to get that behaviour is with the special "from 
__future__ import" statement:

>>> from __future__ import print_function
>>> print "Hello world"
  File "<stdin>", line 1
    print "Hello world"
                      ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
>>> print("Hello world")
Hello world

Alternatively, sometimes if you have an error on one line, the 
interpreter doesn't see it until you get to the next, and then you get 
a SyntaxError on one line past the actual error.

E.g. if you forgot to close the bracket:

...
else:
    print int(reply ** 2
print 'Bye'

then you would (probably) get a SyntaxError on the line with the print.



-- 
Steven D'Aprano