Some basic newbie questions...

[jonathan.beckett]

Chris Mellon wrote:
> On 28 Dec 2006 08:40:02 -0800, jonathan.beckett
> <jonathan.beckett at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > While working on support at work, I have been picking away at Python -
> > because I think it could be a valuable scripting tool for building
> > utilities from. I have been reading the python.org tutorials, and
> > playing around with some basic code, but I have ended up with a few
> > questions that probably have straightforward answers - any quick
> > explanations or assistance would be fantastic...
> >
> >
> > Question 1...
> > Given the code below, why does the count method return what it does?
> > How *should* you call the count method?
> >   a = []
> >   a.append(1)
> >   print a.count
> >
>
> print a.count(). There's a "Python for VB programmers" out there
> somewhere, see if you can find it. In python, functions (and methods
> which are special cases of functions) are first class objects, so
> you're printing the function object, not calling it.
>
> >
> > Question 2...
> > What is the correct way of looping through a list object in a class via
> > a method of it? (I've hit all sorts of errors picking away at this, and
> > none of the tutorials I've found so far cover it very well) - apologies
> > for the arbitrary class - it's the first example I thought up...
> >
> > class Gun:
> >     Shells = 10
> >
> > class Battleship:
> >     Gun1 = Gun()
> >     Gun2 = Gun()
> >     Guns = [Gun1,Gun2]
> >
> >     def getShellsLeft(self):
> >         NumShells = 0
> >         for aGun in Guns:
> >             NumShells = NumShells + aGun.Shells
> >         return NumShells
> >
> > Bizmark = Battleship()
> >
> > print Bizmark.getShellsLeft()
> >
> >
> > In the above code, I guess I'm just asking for the *correct* way to do
> > these simple kinds of things...
> >
>
> You have the right idea but you've got your object instantiation
> wrong. As I write this, I see an email from Grant Edwards that sums
> things up nicely, I'll let him explain it.
>
> I suggest working through the Python tutorial and Dive Into Python,
> which will introduce you to the concepts you're getting wrong here.
>
> > --
> > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
> >

I'm not a VB programmer :)  I'm just tooling around with Python while I
have time, figuring out how the syntax hangs together before I start
trying to do anything remotely clever with it.

I normally work with PHP, C#, Javascript, and the odd bit of C++, but
find myself doing christmas support, so am looking for something to
pick away at until the phone rings :)

One thing I would like to do is play with pySQLite, which looks like it
might be very handy indeed for making migration tools...