Show off your Python chops and compete with others

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 11:00 AM, Nathaniel Sokoll-Ward
<nathanielsokollward at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thought this group would appreciate this: www.metabright.com/challenges/python
>
> MetaBright makes skill assessments to measure how talented people are at different skills. And recruiters use MetaBright to find outrageously skilled job candidates.
>
> Python is a new area of expertise for us. We make "Challenges" for a bunch of languages and we're excited to finally have Python released. Give it a shot -- I'd love to hear what you think.

"""How could you open a file c:\scores.dat to write in binary?

outfile = open("c:\\scores.dat", "w")
outfile = open("c:\scores.dat", "a")
outfile = open("c:\\scores.dat", "w")
outfile = open("c:\\scores.dat", "wb")"""

Not technically wrong, but stylistically suspect; I would recommend
using forward slashes (which work fine on Windows) and avoiding the
drive letter, both of which avoid making your example
Windows-specific. (At least, I don't think there are any other
platforms Python supports that use drive letters; OS/2 support was
dropped a little while ago, though I believe Paul Smedley still
maintains a port. But I digress.)

"""Which method will write a pickled representation of the object to
an open file?"""

Method names without object names aren't all that useful. Do you mean
"Which method of the pickle module..."?

"""From which languages are Python classes derived from?"""

Sounds like Python history trivia more than a coding challenge, but if
that's what you want to go for, sure.

ChrisA