lab_dice/assessment.md

Dice Lab Assessment

Everything works as expected. Nice work!

Comments

I thought your observation that "This method of problem solving is more organized than how I would have written a Yahtzee program using my past experience" was interesting. I agree, though it's certainly possible to write OOP badly, and thereby increase the complexity of a problem :) I find that I increasingly think deeply about whether to use an OO approach or a functional approach--basically, whether to focus on nouns or verbs.

Your decision to count 3- and 4-of-a-kind with a zero-initialized dict works well:

of_each_counter={1:0, 2:0, 3:0, 4:0, 5:0, 6:0}

Two alternatives from the standard library are worth keeping in mind for the future. A Counter just takes a list and counts instances of each value.

>>> from collections import Counter
>>> counter = Counter([1, 3, 3, 5, 3])
>>> print(counter)
Counter({3: 3, 1: 1, 5: 1})

A defaultdict is like a normal dict, but when you first access a key, its value is initialized for you if it's not already present.

>>> from collections import defaultdict
>>> counts = defaultdict(int)
>>> for face in die_faces:
...     counts[face] += 1

Another "pythonic" trick would be available for GoalYahtzee, where you check whether all the dice faces are the same:

for die in dice:
    if die!=dice[0].face:
        flag=False

In this case, I'll often convert the list into a set, which enforces member uniqueness.

unique_faces = set(dice)
if len(unique_faces) == 1:
    print("Yahtzee!")