initialising variables in python
This page is mainly about initialising variables in python
In this tutorial, I'll be using Python 3.8 with the IDLEX extensions installed.
There are a number of reasons why we might want to initialise a variable value …
It may well be that we want to increment or decrement it. If we wanted to initialise a variable that we could increment, we may start it off on a fairly low value, like 0. If we wanted to initialise a variable that we could decrement, we may start it off on a slightly higher value, maybe even 100.
We may also want to initialise a variable that we can append values to. In that case, we'd normally initialise it as an empty list.
Finally, we may want to initialise a variable to use as a flag. A flag is used to indicate whether something has, or hasn't, happened yet.
It's quite normal to initialise variables one at a time, so for instance ...
>>> total = 0
>>> shopping = []
>>> finished = False
But if you have to initialise more than one variable that we wanted to initialise with the same function, we could initialise them like this ...
>>> total = maximum = 0
>>> shopping = bought = []
>>> finished = found = False
Nice, eh?
Last modified: May 17th, 2023
