Thanks everyone for you thoughtful replies... And yes Simon you are right... I do need to learn how to read 'tracebacks' (and de-bugging tools in general)... but you are the first person to give me a step-by-step explination, thank you.
And LOL you all caught my dropped single-quote ;-) .... but unfortunately that was just a typo, not generated by my code. And Simon thanks for this.... > That's a lot of calls to str() to change the parts of parts *back* into > strings after changing them into ints. Why don't you just say > something like: > > soL, siL, siR, soR = parts > oL, iL, iR, oR = map(int, parts) > oLoL = int(soL + soL) > oLiL = int(soL + siL) > . > . > . > etc... > ? ... I've never used mapping before, so this will be a good start. > If you're calling this function as many times as you indicate below > (just under a quarter of a million(!) if I understand you correctly, > 480*500 = 240,000) , it might even result in a human-noticeable speed > up. ;-) Oh it get's worse that that... it'll be (possibly) up to 500 times per equation, for 334 equations, for 480 'seed numbers'... 500 * 334 * 480 = 80,327,000 calculations =:-o So every little speed up helps! ---- > Ok, so there you go. At this point in the program parts[1] is '-', > which isn't an int literal, so the script raises an exception. One > very good thing to do here, as others have already mentioned, would be > to "print parts" at the beginning of your equate() function. That way > you could see exactly which data are causing the problem. Ok guys I'm not such a noob I didn't try that ;-) but unfortunately it didn't enlighten anything. However, as Simon points out... > None of this has anything to do with the error you posted. You're not > even getting as far as calling eval() or pow(). > The traceback tells you, unambiguously, that it's the latter, the > variable cast. the one thing I didn't mention (in trying to spare everyone having to read *all* my code) is that the above mentioned list 'parts' of which I am trying to use parts[1] etc, is passed in from another function... and though I have gone over it repaetedly, looking for possible sources of errors, Simons suggestion points to the problem originating there... so I'll just have to keep looking. Unfortunately I am going to have to put this project* away for a while now, so let me just thank everyone again for helping a newcomer (I hope someday I can return the favor) and let's retire this thread. * BTW If any of you are interested in details of the project it's self feel free to email me. Thanks again! -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
