Posts by woooee

Recursion usually means something that calls itself. The following is a link to a sort that uses recursion. Note that in the sort there is a way to tell if the item has already been tested/done. Recursion is used for things like sorts and walking a directory to get files from subdirectories.
http://www.faqts.com/knowledge_base/view.phtml/aid/4491

##Recursion to compute a factorial
def factorial(n) :
   if n < 2 :
      return 1
   else :
      return ( n * factorial(n-1) )

I cannot get my return of the Fibonacci number to work properly and when I ran this program with fib(10) it ran forever.

'Ran forever' because you are calculating using the same number over and over. Look at your output. If you want to compute a fib you first have to start with two numbers. The sequence 1, 1, 2, 3, 5 actually starts with zero and one. You can start with any two numbers you want, or with one number and number-1, so if we start with 10 and 10-1=9, store those two numbers in a list, pass the list to the function which adds them together, then element[0] = element[1], and element[1] = the sum, and continue by returning the updated list. If you still can't figure it out, post back. When testing a loop, it is a good idea to put in a counter and if it is greater than some number, say 1000, exit with an error message.

Edit: I'm now wondering if you want to calculate the fibs used to calculate a number. I would think that mpossible as it can be any two numbers in combination. For example 10=9+1 or 8+2, etc. If you can explain what you want to do in words or have some math, please post back.

You can use type()

x = random.randint(0,10)
y = random.randint(0,10)
li = [1,2]
li2 = [x,y]

test_list = []
if every_value of li2 is in li:
    if type(every_value) == type(test_list) :
       do this

Note that 'of li2 is in li' will compare entire list to list, not each element, assuming every_value is a list. It is not considered good code practice to use the letters 'el', 'eye', or 'oh' for variable names as they look too much like numbers and are confusing.