[Tutor] execute a function

[Dave Angel]

On 09/26/2011 06:53 AM, Sajjad wrote:
> Hello forum,
>
>
> It has been two days that i have started with python and i am stuck with the
> following simple issue:
>
> i have created a python file and inside the file i have defined a function
> as follows:
>
> ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
> def greeting():
>        print "Welcome to python"
>
> ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
>
> I am following the Book named - "Rapid GUI programming with Python and Qt"
>
> In the book they mentioned that  in the command line if i type
>
> greeting() i should get the output "Welcome to python"
>
> But i get nothing.
>
>
> Any hint on this?
>
>
> Regards
> Sajjad
>
A little more precision would be helpful.  You never told us what you 
called that source file.  And there are several possible "command line" 
you might be referring to.   The most likely are the shell, and the 
interpreter prompt.  if you had shown us your session (via cut 'n 
paste), we might have been able to guess.

If you get nothing, then you must be somewhere else, since each of those 
will give you some response, depending on which shell you're running.  
So for example, if you're running Python 2.7 on Linux 10.04, with Bash 
as your shell, you might get

davea at think:~$ greeting()
 >


That > prompt means you haven't finished the command line, and bash is 
waiting for the rest.  Use Ctrl-C to get out of that one.  Greeting is 
not a program from bash's point of view.

or if I'm running in the interpreter, I might get:

Python 2.7.1+ (r271:86832, Apr 11 2011, 18:13:53)
[GCC 4.5.2] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
 >>> greeting()
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
NameError: name 'greeting' is not defined
 >>>

And this would be because two errors have occurred.  In the above 
session I didn't import the source file, and I didn't qualify the name 
greeting so the interpreter could look in that module.

I would normally just add the greeting() call to the bottom of the 
source file  firstprogram.py, and then run the whole thing with

davea at think:~$ python firstprogram.py

But your tutorial may have other ideas, so you'd best tell us what 
you've tried, and exactly what happened.




-- 

DaveA