[Tutor] lists of lists: more Chutes & Ladders!

[spir]

On 12/31/2013 09:46 PM, Keith Winston wrote:
> Thanks Denis, I found out about the iter builtin last night, a few hours
> after I'd coded/posted that. Oops. Thanks for your other comments, I am
> clearer now about the distinction of creating a new, empty list vs.
> clearing the same list out, and the subsequent implications on other
> symbols bound to the same list (is that the right language?).

Thanks, thus I did not spoil my time ;-)

> Not to beat a dead horse: you mention the name of the "game" method: in my
> code, "game" plays a game of Chutes & Ladders (does a series of moves until
> the game is over), compiles the statistics from said game, and passes
> those, as a list of ints & lists, to be gathered into a list of lists at
> the next level ("games" is the list of lists, composed of many "game"
> lists). I should absolutely document it better, but does that still not
> seem like a good name to you? Thanks for your feedback.

In the part you showed us, unless my memory trumps myself, the method barely 
collected stat data _about_ the game. I did not look like representing the 
game's *playing* globally. But indeed, it was probably only a snippet.

Well, actually the case looks ambiguous. If at all possible, i would separate in 
a sub-method the piece of code that compiles statistic data. Call it stats or 
game_stats or whatever looks clear and correct. The super-method that plays the 
game and, as an after-thought (even if it's not the case for you) calls this 
sub-method that collects data _about_ the game, may be called 'play'. This, 
because the whole of the app is, conceptually, the 'game', isn't it? or am I 
wrong on this point?

Also, again conceptually, this method is an action (playing the game), thus a 
verb fits well as a name for it. A function that only computes new data (which 
is the case for stats) would requires a noun as name, the name of what it 
computes. But this is all rather personal and you may have a different 
perspective on all this. (However, this scheme of verbs for actions and nouns 
for functions works fine, I'm not inventing it; for this reason, I do recommend 
it as a consistent starting point; then you may later forge your own standard & 
shortcuts, or adopt the ones of your preferred programming community).

Denis