Just a quick question about main()

[ROGER GRAYDON CHRISTMAN]

While teaching my introductory course in Python, I occasionally see
submissions containing the following two program lines, even before
I teach about functions and modules:

if __name__ = '__main__':
...  main()

When I ask about it, I hear things like they got these from other instructors,
or from other students who learned it from their instructors, or maybe
from some on-line programming tutorial site.

I'm all on board with the first of these two lines -- and I teach it myself
as soon as I get to modules.

My question is more about the second.

Do "real" Pythonista's actually define a new function main() instead
of putting the unit test right there inside the if?

Or am I correct in assuming that this main() is just an artifact from
people who have programmed in C, C++, or Java for so long that
they cannot imagine a program without a function named "main"?

I guess I'm not stuck on that habit, since my programming experiences
go way back to the old Fortran days....


Roger Christman
Pennsylvania State University