The gist of this whole post was that all I did was write a few painfully simple lines of Python, have an idea to run it through the parser, do so, and beam at myself because the parser did things right. I was that proud simply because I’ve had absolutely no prior knowledge of Python at all. If something like this has occurred to you before, let me know through commenting

Here’s my story in full. Be warned that it might slightly bore you in the first couple paragraphs. So yesterday I was just messing with my WordPress demo installation…

I was writing this post on code snippets, just got done with my PHP snippet. Then I was considering adding in a couple more snippets for different languages: Java and Python.

Unfortunately, Potassium currently doesn’t have a custom <pre> background image for Python (though it has one for Java) so I finally decided to drop both languages because I was too darn lazy to think of a snippet for Java since I’m only a beginner in that language. Hell, I didn’t even know any of Python at all!

I read only a couple of pages of Python tutorials which I didn’t even understand… or at least I didn’t think I did. I wrote a basic function just for the snippets post… and that was exactly when I finally chose to drop the two languages from the post.

But, since I had Python and its command line interpreter installed (in order to use things like the really cool iPod shuffle Database Builder and the mighty fine Blender and others), I thought, why don’t I give my function and script a whirl in the Python interpreter? So I did.

It worked! It was a ridiculously simple function, constituting only six lines excluding whitespace and comments. With those, along with one more line just to test the function, since declaring just a function without doing anything else would only leave the interpreter quiet, it’s less than twenty lines.

Can you believe it? The only thing I knew about Python was that it’s free software and was installed on my PC and I heard it was easy to pick up, especially for beginning programmers. And suddenly I read barely three pages, proceeded to throw in less than 20 lines of code into a file and the interpreter carried out my instruction duly.

If you’re curious, here’s my script, a function that just calculates the factorial of any integer (the idea was taken from a Java intro tutorial which covered a factorial class). All of it. Verbatim. Straight from my file.

# Factorial function
def factorial(n):

    result = 1

    # To calculate the factorial of a number, take
    # all integers from 1 to itself and multiply them
    for i in range(n):
        j = i + 1
        result *= j

    return result

# Test our function with 100 integers
for i in range(100):
    print "%d! = %d" % (i, factorial(i))

print "done"

Well I cheated. I got to know the syntax of the last line (which incidentally does work similarly to PHP’s printf() function) by looking at the iPod shuffle DB Builder’s source code But that was all.

And yes, as of now I know Potassium still doesn’t recognize Python snippets. But it will… probably in Potassium 1.0.3 or even 1.1.0 should I deem fit.

Again, if something like my story has happened to you before, go ahead and leave a comment.