Cleaning up conditionals

[Deborah Swanson]

Sorry guys. I've read all your responses and I kind of get their general
drift, but I'm about four sheets to the wind right now, and no way would
I make it more than a step or two in playing around with these things
and trying to get my head around them before it would all descend into a
cacaphony of gibberish.

Python really is a thing of beauty in a class all its own. I've been
doing computers since 1972. I started out doing machine code on IBM's
7090 octal machine, then I stepped up to assembler on the hexadecimal
IBM 360/40, a mainframe that needed a machine room the size of two
classrooms to house it and all its peripherals. (Disk drives were the
size of huge round birthday cakes, tape drives were each housed in 4' x
4' cabinets, and the printers had to go out in the hallway because they
couldn't even fit in the same room with the computer.) The first high
level language I stepped up to was PL/1, a real behemoth of its time, a
one-foot-in-front-of-the-other procedural languaage from its insides
out, and a full set of all its manuals filled a small library. Funny
though, for all its "primitivity" compared to modern languages, we did
artificial intelligence, symbolic calculus (no numbers, just complex
integrals and differentials of function names, with x, y and z for
arguments) and weather modelling with it. And I've learned smatterings
of Java, C and C++, but nowhere have I seen the kinds of magic that can
be done with python. I've been exposed to applying functions to a list
of values, so I fully believe that what you present is valid python and
it works. I just don't fully understand how and will have to work with
it.

So, in the morning I'll scrape my braincells together and work with what
you've given me, and see if I can understand it and make your examples
work. Well worth the detour from finding the perfect place to move to (a
project that has become a little less urgent due to recent events). So
stay tuned. I'm not ignoring you, I just need a good night's sleep and
then maybe a good long while before I have anything to show for doing
anything with this, or even intelligent questions.  Thank you all in
advance, I'm expecting to learn a lot from this little exercise.