This is most likely a silly question and me not understanding python
enough. I am a mentor for some high school kids participating in a
supercomputing challenge. My background in programming is F77 (yeah
laugh it up) and I want the kids to learn python and use it for the
challenge. They picked a project to model the flow of smallpox in a city and
surroundings areas. So I saw the game of life and thought maybe they
could modify it for use as a smallpox model. My question is when I run
this code as is and execute the command to generate a world, I get the
following error:
Traceback (most recent call last): File "<pyshell#0>", line 1, in -toplevel- print_world(make_random_world(10, 10)) File "C:\Python23\gameoflife.py", line 12, in make_random_world world[i, j] = random.choice([LIVE, DEAD]) NameError: global name 'random' is not defined
Does "random" need to be defined after LIVE,DEAD or am I just missing something. I was trying to run this on my work computer which is a winXP machine running python 2.4.
Thanks, Ara
<SNIP>
Hi Ara,
Not an expert, but from the traceback, my guess is that you've not included the line
import random
in your script before the call to random.choice.
Random and other modules need to be imported before they can be used. You can think of import loosely as doing two things:
1) adding a module to the available command set, and
2) running whatever top level code is contained in the module.
There is a fairly strong convention to put all imports near the beginning of a module (usually after the module docstring and any legal kung-fu).
Does that clear it up?
Best,
Brian vdB _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
