Understanding - Intermediate, exercise 1

Text

The variables my_gn_list and my_fn_list store the lists of the characters, excluding any space, of your given name and family name in lowercase, respectively. Also, consider the last number (i.e. the rightmost) of the year when you were born as stored in the variable my_number. Study the execution of the following function passing my_gn_list, my_fn_list and my_number as input (i.e. f(my_gn_list, my_fn_list, my_number)).

def f(gn_list, fn_list, cur_number):
    all_numbers = list()
    for i in range(cur_number):
        if i < len(fn_list):
            all_numbers.append(i)

    idx = -1
    while True:
        idx = idx + 1
        if idx < len(gn_list):
            cur_char = gn_list[idx]
            for n in all_numbers:
                if cur_char == fn_list[n]:
                    return cur_char, n

Hints

Depending on the particular input specified, the function can have two distinct behaviours. On the one hand, it may return a tuple containing a character and the first position where such character appears in the family name provided as input. On the other hand, it will run forever in case no return statement is not executed.

Additional material

The runnable Python file is available online. You can run it executing the command python exercise_1.py in a shell, and then following the instructions on screen to specify the intended input.