I'm in love, with Python! Options

[mipadi]

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I started writing a discrete event simulator tonight with a friend of mine. It's going to simulate random D&D encounters. We've both used Python before, but not that much; since we wanted to learn it more, we decided to implement the simulator using Python.

And damn, it's awesome! It can do some really interesting stuff. Having mostly used C, C++, and Java in the past, Python has been a liberating experience!

Here's an example of its coolness. One of the objects in the simulator is a BattleGrid, which is a simple rectangular grid made up of Square objects, which contain info about the squares. When creating a BattleGrid class, I initialize it with default squares. Here's how the code would look in Java:

CODE

this.grid = new Square[this.height()][this.width()];
for (int row = 0; row < this.height(); row++) {
    for (int col = 0; col < this.width(); col++) {
        this.grid[row][col] = new Square();
    }
}

But in Python, it's only a single line of code!

CODE

self.grid = [[Square() for w in xrange(self.width)] for h in xrange(self.height)]

At one point, I also print out a textual representation of the grid. In Java, the code would be kind of annoying to write:

CODE

StringBuilder buf = new StringBuilder("Battle Grid " + this.width() + "x" + this.height() + "\n");
for (int row = 0; row < this.height(); row++) {
    buf.append("|");
    for (int col = 0; col < this.width(); col++) {
        buf.append(this.grid[row][col].moveCost());
    }
    buf.append("|\n");
}
String str = new String(buf);
str = str.substring(0, str.length()-1);    // Trim off the trailing newline character
return str;

But in Python, it's way easier!

CODE

desc = ["Battle Grid (%dx%d)" % self.size]
for row in self.rows:
    costs = [str(col.move_cost) for col in row]
    costs = " ".join(costs)
    dstr = "|%s|" % costs
    desc.append(dstr)
return "\n".join(desc)

I think I'm in love.