On Sun, Feb 9, 2014 at 12:21 PM, Scott W Dunning <[email protected]> wrote:
> I figured it out! Thanks Chris! Taking it one step at a time with the five
> digit number really helped me to see how to break it all up! Are you a
> teacher? I appreciate the help and the patients! I like that you don’t just
> give me the answer that you break it down and help me so that I can figure it
> out on my own! Thanks to all of you for all of your help, you guys are
> helping me a lot and I really appreciate it!
>
Awesome!
No, I'm not a teacher by profession, but I was homeschooled, and since
I'm the second of seven children [1], I got used to teaching things to
my siblings. Also, every week I run a Dungeons and Dragons campaign
online, which requires similar skills. (Teaching maths is way easier
than getting my players to figure out some puzzles. I had no idea
that, in a group of half a dozen nerds, nobody would recognize this
broken text: "In brightest day, in blackest night / No evil ......
sight / Let .... worship .... mi.... / .... my power .... tern...." -
I'd have thought the first line alone would be enough for anyone who's
at least mildly nerdy and/or geeky.)
(We start in fifteen minutes. Want to come watch? Just telnet to
minstrelhall.com port 221!)
> Here is how I did it if you’re curious.….
>
> seconds = raw_input("Enter the number of seconds:")
> seconds = int(seconds)
> weeks = seconds/604800
> weeks_rem = seconds % 604800
> days = weeks_rem / 86400
> days_rem = seconds % 86400
> hours = days_rem / 3600
> hours_rem = seconds % 3600
> minutes = hours_rem / 60
> minutes_rem = seconds % 60
> seconds = minutes_rem % 60
>
> print weeks, 'weeks', days, 'days', hours, 'hours', minutes, 'minutes',
> seconds, 'seconds'
>
> Not sure if that’s the correct way to do it but it works! If there is any
> other advice I’ll take it.
That's certainly effective. It's going to give you the right result. I
would be inclined to start from the small end and strip off the
seconds first, then the minutes, etc, because then you're working with
smaller divisors (60, 60, 24, 7 instead of 604800, 86400, 3600, 60);
most people will understand that a week is 7 days, but only people who
work with DNS will know that it's 604800 seconds. But both work.
You'll also note that you're trimming off bits and leaving "residual
seconds". I would put all the "_rem" values back into "seconds", which
would let you use augmented assignment:
weeks = seconds/604800
seconds %= 604800
days = seconds / 86400
seconds %= 86400
hours = seconds / 3600
seconds %= 3600
minutes = seconds / 60
seconds %= 60
This emphasizes that you're stripping components off and keeping the
number of remaining seconds for the next step. But that's pretty
minor. Main thing is, you know what you're doing; you have to not just
get the right answer, but know WHY you get that answer.
ChrisA
[1] Our father's not a captain, but there's still nothing about being
a non-captain with seven children. And that movie is definitely one of
our favorite things.
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