I don't understand how to multiply and use slice in this question

Question

Gosh, stuck at this for a good half an hour.
```twoples.py
def multiply(string, *args):
    product = string 
    count = 0 
    for elements in args:
        product += elements
return product 
```

Alex Koumparos · Answer

Hi Moses,
Let's work through your code:
Python
def multiply(string, *args):

The challenge is only going to give you numbers, no strings. If you want to specifically separate the first argument from all the subsequent arguments, I'd suggest you give it a more appropriate name, like first_num. Alternatively, you could just take one argument: *args and then access the first element in that in your function body (which would mean you would later be slicing the other elements from *args to work through).
Python
    product = string

You are only going to be working with numbers, so you wouldn't want to put a string in your product variable and then later combine it with numbers.
Python
    count = 0

Between string and count it's clear that you are looking to have some initial value that is going to be built up every time you cycle through your for loop. However, count never gets used after you initialise it. And product you're initialising with something called string, which implies that you expect this to have a string type instead of a number type. 
If you are expecting string to be the first number you are given, then this part will work fine, but you don't want count. If you want to start with a fixed initial value (like we would use 0 if we were repeatedly summing values), you'd want to start with 1, not 0.
Alternatively, if you were just using a single argument, *args and wanted to initialise with the first value from that, you could do:
Python
product = args[0]

Python
    for elements in args:
        product += elements

Your program is supposed to be multiplying all the elements, but you are summing them.
Hope that clears everything up for you
Cheers
Alex

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Moses Ong

Moses Ong

I don't understand how to multiply and use slice in this question

1 Answer

Alex Koumparos

Alex Koumparos