beginner code problem

[DaveM]

On Fri, 2 Jun 2006 18:41:53 -0400, RJ <victimorcrime at yahoo.com> wrote:

>  I'm trying to teach myself Python (probably running into the old dog 
>new tricks issue) and I'm trying to start with the very basics to get a 
>handle on them.
>
>  I'm trying to write code to get the computer to flip a coin 100 times 
>and give me the output of how many times heads and tails. After solving 
>a few syntax errors I seem to be stuck in an endless loop and have to 
>kill python. A few times I would get it to print 'heads 0 (or 1) times 
>and tails 1 (or 0) times' 100 times.
>
>Here's the code I wrote:
>
>import random
>
>flip = random.randrange(2)
>heads = 0
>tails = 0
>count = 0
>
>while count < 100:
>
>	if flip == 0:
>		heads += 1
>	
>	else:
>		tails += 1
>	
>
>	count += 1
>	
>	
>
>print "The coin landed on heads", heads, 'times ' \
>         "and tails", tails, 'times'

Several problems here. "flip" is defined just once, so you'll either have
100 heads or tails and your whitespace is all wrong - that's important in
Python. Here's how it should look:

import random

def coinflip():
    heads = 0
    tails = 0
    for goes in range(100):
        if random.randrange(2) == 1:
            heads += 1
        else:
            tails += 1
    print "heads", heads
    print "tails", tails

if __name__ == "__main__":
    coinflip()