newbie: good reasons for learning Python?

[Mel Wilson]

In article <o1NIa.611$hY1.47591 at news20.bellglobal.com>,
"Sean Ross" <sross at connectmail.carleton.ca> wrote:
>Better yet, go here:
>http://99-bottles-of-beer.ls-la.net/
>
>BTW, you can do something similar to the Ruby version in Python, though the
>"and/or" idiom is *strongly* discouraged for its potential pitfalls. (Let's
>go, PEP 308!  heh)
>
>for i in xrange(99, 0, -1):
>    print "%s bottle%s of beer on the wall" % (i, i > 1 and 's' or '')
>    print "%s bottle%s of beer" % (i, i > 1 and 's' or '')
>    print "take one down, pass it around"
>    print "%s bottle%s of beer on the wall\n" % (i==1 and 'no' or i-1, i !=
>2 and 's' or '')

   Inspiring.  But after I'd improved on it, I went to the
web site and found out I'd only recreated the programs you
were writing an alternative to.  Oh well.

Although

    's'[:i != 1]

is a cute way to generate the plural endings.

        Regards.        Mel.



verse = """%(N)s bottle%(P)s of beer on the wall,
%(N)s bottle%(P)s of beer
take one down, pass it around
%(N1)s bottle%(P1)s of beer on the wall
"""
for i in xrange (99, 0, -1):
    print verse % {'N':i,   'P':'s'[:i != 1]
                   , 'N1':i-1 or 'no',   'P1':'s'[:i-1 != 1]}


   Another way is to eliminate the named substitutions, and
build the substitution tuple as

    ((i, 's'[0:i != 1])*2 + (i-1 or 'no', 's'[0:i-1 != 1]))

but that too was anticipated in the web site.  Hmmph.