Looking for some basic guidance/help with my hangman game script from the python basics course

lol, the worst bit is that i thought i was getting somewhere, but i guess i shouldn't have been put off asking questions for fear of seeming dumb, as the fact that i literally don't know what your talking about is just depressing. im not sure what a scope is, or a class, and that probably means im even wrong about what a variable is doesn't it? also an instance, not sure ive come accross that either. you think it's just a 'not in my mental capacity' sort of thing or is it worth starting again?

I did not mean to scare or discourage you. Absolute anyone can learn to program. However it took me years to figure out all by myself, simply because no one ever told me what to read up on. Maybe you should finish some more tracks here on treehouse, that will at least explain what a class, and what an instance of a class is. You can read about scope on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_(computer_science) although it is a little tad technical. But you also learn about scopes from working with classes.

Google everything, and read a lot. Understanding programming might be a long road, and one that feels like it never quite finishes, as you learn new things all the time. But you can definitely do it. Also I definitely reccommend Python as a first language. Good luck!

Yes you can think of a class as a group of variables and methods (functions) that mutate (change the variables) on an object (an instance of a class).

In python everything is objects. Which is why you can use

"Hello world".upper ()

"Hello world" is an object (instance) of the string class. And upper is a method of the string class. Strings might be a bad example because in python they are immutable meaning they cannot be changed after instantiation. Which is why upper () returns a new object of type string with the desired content. Instead of mutating the current one.

The reason python could not find your variables when you didn't include them in the method signature, is because the were out of scope. A.k.a unreachable in the current context.

You are right that you should pass the information along with to the functions. But you should group them in a class. That way you can get away with only passing one object to the function. Namely the object containing all the current games data. (PS you can also make everything into methods on your game class and thus not need to pass any data in the method signature.)

As for your last statement. You could redirect stdout to "print to apache" (a webserver) such that you can output it to a website. And python has many tools for webdevelopment. While I agree that printing can't be turned into a game, you can try something like pygame if you want 2d graphics ;)

Python can do anything!

Well, Usually I refer to functions belonging to a class for a method. But it is essentially the same thing, like you're saying.

An object is an instance of a class. You can view the class as the blueprint, and the object the thing produced according to that blueprint. There may be thousands of products made from the same blueprint, but they all have the same features. They can have different colors, sizes and prices, but they are all the same thing. (In this example colors sizes and prices would be attributes on the class (blueprint))

Don't be discouraged though. I suggest just continuing on the tracks here at treehouse and see where that takes you. It is also slightly difficult for me to explain everything, as all of the terms I use to describe stuff might feel a little advanced, when in fact the idea is usually quite simple.

im sorry i know its a pain but im determined to get it before i move on, im going to learn to program if it kills me, ive decided

So, I didn't spend much time on this, but this is one way you could alter it to be class based:

http://pastebin.com/tg26UDrK

Note that this could be done much better, but I just copied and pasted your code basically.

Which also reminds me that I should tell you that your code just dives deeper and deeper into the stack frame, which I think eventually will crash python, as I seem to remember that python's max call depth is 500. Not that you will ever notice this in any use case you encounter. You can see this by putting this right under import sys, and then guessing a few times:

sys.setrecursionlimit(20)

To understand this however you need to read more up on computer architechture and stacks. (My tip is to ignore this for now, but keep it mind for a later date). I tried to fix some of the most obvious places where you should return instead of call the function you want to go to. But again, if you dont understand this, dont care too much about it.

No one ever forced me to reply to you. I think it is great that you want to learn programming. And like you are saying, it is probably not covered in the introduction to python.

Let's not talk about stack frames, as they are pretty complicated for beginners. (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10057443/explain-the-concept-of-a-stack-frame-in-a-nutshell)

You can view it as a subprocess like you're saying, albeit a little confusing, since subprocesses is another concept altogether. (https://docs.python.org/2/library/subprocess.html)

I am sorry for being so hard on you when it comes to terminology, but it also helps a lot to have the terminology right when you want to google things ;)

If you ever need help, just pm me, ill be glad to assist. Cheers

A few more comments: 'global' is not a function, it is a keyword. (A function takes arguments, like so: function(argument1 argument2), this is also a difference in python 2 and python 3, the print statement was changed to a function, which is why

print "this works in python 2 but not python 3"
print ("this works in python 2 and python 3")

)

It is considered bad practice to have a lot of global variables because it quickly gets unmanagable in larger programs. Because you quickly lose track of which functions modify what variables and when. This is why you encapsulate (you can google this word for more information) the data instead of making everything global. However, it is also important to note that even if some people call something bad practice it can still be a good or viable idea to use it nontheless.

When it comes to stack frames, you might already know that if you call a function the variables defined inside that function are temporary and private to that function only (scope again). This is because in the underlying implementation you create what is called a stack frame, containing all those local variables. Every time you call a function inside another function, you create a stack frame inside that stack frame. As you can imagine, this can go pretty deep. When you return from a function, the current stack frame is collapsed [and the return value is pushed to the top of the stack.](the information in the square brackets is a topic in and by itself). But since you just keep calling functions inside functions, the loops you create are technically unnessesary, because you just create new stackframes (this is what is known as recursive functions). Python does not optimize for tailrecursion (again, you shouldn't even attempt to google this at this point), which essentially means you keep building those stack frames, and the limit is set to 500 of those stack frames inside eachother. (I think 500 is the default). Fixing this in your game would require some careful thinking and rewriting though, so don't bother. But it is nice to know that you should be careful with highly recursive functions in python. That was very technical, but I know I find information like this super interesting, so I thought I'd share.

The most important piece of information is the second paragraph though ;)

Cheers

or i would if i knew how anyway!!