John Connors wrote: > I understand that the "else" is not neccessary for the program to work > but should I include it to show the end of the loop? I guess it's not > important in a program like this that has only 1 loop but maybe it makes > reading more complcated programs easier or is the indentation sufficient?
'else' in a for loop has a very specific meaning and usage - the else clause is executed only if the for loop completes normally, without executing a break statement. This is useful when you have a loop that is searching for some condition, and you want to execute some default code if the condition is never met. For example, a simple loop to search a list for a value and print a result could look like this (note: this is NOT the best way to solve this problem, it is just a simple example of for / else): >>> def search(value, lst): ... for item in lst: ... if value == item: ... print 'Found', value ... break ... else: ... print value, 'not found' ... >>> lst = range(10) >>> search(3, lst) Found 3 >>> search(11, lst) 11 not found for / else is very handy in this situation and should not be used just to show that the loop is over. Kent _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor