Hi, I'm Tony. I'm a translator. This is my first post to this list. I've been using Linux, pretty well exclusively, for about 8 years, but I never got under the hood more than learning the shell basics to do basic stuff that I needed to do, manipulating config files. (Although I did recently make my own "distro" for translators, but it's just a remaster of PCFluxboxOS with some changes to the software to include some tools for translators, linguasos.org). But, I've finally decided that I want more control over my machine than just manipulating configs, and I want some software that currently doesn't exist, too. So, I've decided to learn to program. This was in November, so, I'm very, very new to programming. I started learning to write bash scripts in November, first, and started learning Tcl in January (I feel like I'm making a lot of progress with Tcl, and have even written a program for translator project mgmt that a number of folks are using already transprocalc.org a very basic program, really, but tcl.tk makes it easy to build a gui, as easy as writing html, really). I've played a little with java, but haven't really gotten beyond "Hello, World!", same with C. But, ESR says if I want to be a hacker, Python is the best place to start, so, this week I started learning python.
I have made a couple of friends on-line, real hackers, who have decided to help teach me. One gave me an assignment to write a program that would generate 5 random numbers, using a loop. I wrote: # Let's make a pizza. # pizza.py # escrito por anthony baldwin / [EMAIL PROTECTED] from random import randint print "I'm hungry!" print "Let's make a nice pizza, eh!" ing = ("pepperoni", "ham", "onions", "sausage", "bacon", "peppers", "spiders", "mozzarella", "anchovies", "chocolate chips", "dog hairs", "toe-nail clippings", "fried clams", "lollipops", "paper clips", "calamari", "m&ms", "broccoli", "gum drops", "green beans") print "Let's make a pizza with" for i in range(5): p = randint(0,19) # someone told me I could have done len(ing), but I do not know what 'len' is yet. print ing[p] print " " print "That's a nice pizza, eh! " print "Mangeamos!" The other told me that the following was used to separate the sheep from the goats, so to speak, which I don't quite understand, since it took me all of 10 minutes to figure it out. He told me to write a program that would print 5 lines, like this: * ** *** **** ***** With a loop, and in such fashion that it could be easily extended to continue up to any number of lines. I thought this one was easy. I did: # twinkle stars python / twinkle.py # escrito por anthony baldwin / [EMAIL PROTECTED] t = "*" print "Twinkle, twinkle little stars." for i in range(5): print t * (i+1) print "Twinkle, twinkle..." So. How'd I do? (I wrote these using a simple text editor that I made with Tcl, too, http://www.linguasos.org/tcltext.html ) /tony -- http://www.LinguasOS.org - Linux for Translators http://www.BaldwinLinguas.com - translating & interpreting http://www.TransProCalc.org - Free translation project mgmt software _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor