[Tutor] Python Question

[Danny Yoo]

On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 2:00 PM, Keith Winston <keithwins at gmail.com> wrote:
> Amy, judging from Danny's replies, you may be emailing him and not the
> list. If you want others to help, or to report on your progress,
> you'll need to make sure the tutor email is in your reply to:

Hi Amy,

Very much so.  Please try to use "Reply to All" if you can.

If you're wondering why I'm asking for you to try to recall any other
example function definitions, I'm doing so specifically because it is
a general problem-solving technique.  Try to see if the problem that's
stumping you is similar to things you've seen before.  Several of the
heuristics from Polya's "How to Solve It" refer to this:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It

If you haven't ever seen any function definition ever before, then we
do have to start from square one.  But this would be a very strange
scenario, to be asked to write a function definition without having
seen any previous definitions before.

If you have seen a function before, then one approach we might take is
try to make analogies to those previous examples.  That's an approach
I'd prefer.