AC2 Ocelots Class - Catherine Bandarchuk

[CatherineBandarchuk]

No description provided.

[kelsey-steven-ada]

Great work Kate! Let me know if there are any comments you'd like clarified =]

[kelsey-steven-ada]

These lines run longer than the PEP8 style guide recommends (79 characters). Even though it will take considerably more space in the file, I would suggest structuring this dictionary with one key/value pair on each line to make it as easy as possible for readers to quickly see and understand the contents.

[kelsey-steven-ada]

I would recommend choosing a parameter name that is different from the constant data structure POOL_LETTERS_DICT to help avoid confusion. Since this is a parameter, it's important to remember anything could be passed in as an argument, it isn't guaranteed to be the dictionary POOL_LETTERS_DICT. Style-wise, in Python we usually stick to lowercase variable names unless they are a global constant, so I would recommend a lowercased name for the parameter.

[kelsey-steven-ada]

This is a solid implementation! If we were in a system where memory was limited and didn't want to start player_letters_list with empty strings we know we will overwrite, another option could be to start with an empty list and use a while loop that stops when the list has 10 elements.

player_letters_list = []
while len(player_letters_list) != 10:
    random_index = random.randint(0, len(all_letter_list) - 1)
    new_letter = all_letter_list.pop(random_index)
    player_letters_list.append(new_letter)

[kelsey-steven-ada]

It looks like POOL_LETTERS_DICT is only accessed by the draw_letters function. If we didn't want to manage worrying about changes to POOL_LETTERS_DICT between calls to draw_letters, another option could be to declare the data structure inside the draw_letters function. There are tradeoffs, the structure would clutter the function some, but it keeps the data as close as possible to where it's being used, and would mean other functions couldn't access it to accidentally alter the contents.

[kelsey-steven-ada]

Nice helper function! Great way to make sure the original POOL_LETTERS_DICT doesn't change between calls to draw_letters.

[kelsey-steven-ada]

Something to consider: this approach will go through the whole word before it returns False. However, the moment we hit any letter that isn't in the word bank, we know the word is invalid. How could we save some processing time by exiting early when we find an invalid letter?

[kelsey-steven-ada]

Worst-case scenario this approach will loop through all values in SCORE_CHART for each letter in the input word for every key in SCORE_CHART. If it was important to reduce processing time, we might want to consider other options for how we structure the scoring data. One option could be to keep the scores in a dictionary similar to POOL_LETTERS_DICT where the keys are letters and the values are their scores. This would let us loop over the characters in word, and skip any letters that aren't in SCORE_CHART.

user_points = 0
for letter in word:
    if letter.upper() in SCORE_CHART:
        user_points += SCORE_CHART[letter]

# another option using dictionary's `get()` function
user_points = 0
for letter in word:
    # Here `get` will return the value for the key `letter.upper()` or 0 if that key does not exist
    user_points += SCORE_CHART.get(letter.upper(), 0)

[kelsey-steven-ada]

Since the value of users_score is overwritten at the start of each loop iteration and does not get used outside of the for-loop, I would remove the declaration here and let it be instantiated for the first time inside the for-loop on line 97 where we call score_word.

[kelsey-steven-ada]

A for-in loop will iterate through a list from index 0 until the end of the list (in order), which means that word_index will always be greater than max_word_index. If we know that 2 words have the same score and the same length, do we ever need to update variables in lines 109-115? What happens if we remove that code?

[kelsey-steven-ada]

Really nice approach, I love the searching and tie-breaking in a single pass over the input word_list !