[Tutor] problem solving with lists: final (amateur) solution

[marcus.luetolf at bluewin.ch]

Hello Experts, dn and Peter,

I am very grateful for you "scrutinizing" my code and I'll take your
critiques  as incentive for improving it. Nevertheless,  It's quite a
moutfull.
But I'm learning much more about programming and python than by courses over
the internet !!!

Just one replay to Peter's last issue:
I used a copy of the original all_players list because I wanted to keep the
original list unaltered.

It will take awhile til my next "presentation".
Regards and thanks, Marcus.

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-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Tutor <tutor-bounces+marcus.luetolf=bluewin.ch at python.org> Im Auftrag
von Peter Otten
Gesendet: Montag, 27. Juni 2022 10:44
An: tutor at python.org
Betreff: Re: [Tutor] problem solving with lists: final (amateur) solution

On 25/06/2022 20:45, marcus.luetolf at bluewin.ch wrote:

dn gave you a long list of things that are bad style or outright broken in
your code, a list that may look rather intimidating.


>      def day_1_flights():
>          key_hist = list(history.keys())
>          c_key_hist = key_hist[:]
>          for dummy_i in c_key_hist:
>              print('flights_day_1: ', c_key_hist[:num_in_flight])
>              for key in c_key_hist[:num_in_flight]:
>                  [history[key].append(player)for player in 
> c_all_players[0:num_in_flight]]
>              del c_key_hist[:num_in_flight]
>              del c_all_players[0:num_in_flight]


If you want to fix your script and are looking for a starting point I
suggest that you begin with the function above and turn it into a so-called
"pure" one. In simple words this means it returns a result that depends only
on its arguments, does not print anything and does not modify mutable
arguments. Calling the function twice with the same input will produce the
same output twice. Pure functions are the easiest to reason about and to
test.

def day_one_flights(players, num_in_flight):
     """Create flights for the first day.

     >>> day_one_flights(["Peter", "Paul", "Mary", "Marcus"], 2)
     [['Peter', 'Paul'], ['Mary', 'Marcus']]
     """
     ...  # your code

The paragraph in the docstring that looks like an interactive Python session
is a "doctest". You can run it in a terminal window with

py -m doctest players_startlist_commented.py -v

and get a nice report on whether the expected output of the doctests
conforms with the actual, i. e. whether your script is bug free to the
extent that you tested it.



Now allow me to mention one issue specifically:

 >          for dummy_i in c_key_hist:
                ...
 >              del c_key_hist[:num_in_flight]

Here you modify the list you are iterating over. If you are smart enough to
understand what that does you should be too smart to do it ;) Do not ever
write such code!
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