exercism_puzzles/python/making-the-grade/HINTS.md

Hints

General

• while loops are used for indefinite (uncounted) iteration
• for loops are used for definite, (counted) iteration.
• The keywords break and continue help customize loop behavior.
• range(<start>, stop, <step>) can be used to generate a sequence for a loop counter.
• The built-in enumerate() will return (<value>, <index>) pairs to iterate over.

Also being familiar with the following can help with completing the tasks:

• lists: indexing, nested lists, <list>.append, <list>.pop().
• str: str() constructor, using the + to concatenate strings, optionally, f-strings.

1. Rounding Scores

• While loops will continue to execute until their test condition evaluates to False.
• <list>.pop() will remove and return the last item in a list.
• Empty lists evaluate to False (most empty objects in Python are "Falsy")

2. Non-Passing Students

• There's no need to declare loop counters or index counters when iterating through an object using a for loop.
• A results counter does need to be set up and incremented -- you'll want to return the count of non-passing students when the loop terminates.

3. The "Best"

• There's no need to declare loop counters or index counters when iterating through an object using a for loop.
• Having an empty list to add the "best" marks to is helpful here.
• <list>.append() can help add things to the results list.

4. Calculating Letter Grades

• These are lower thresholds. The lower threshold for a "D" is a score of 41, since an "F" is <= 40.
• range() can be helpful here to generate a sequence with the proper "F" -> "A" increments.
• round() without parameters should round off increments nicely.
• As with "the best" task, <list>.append() could be useful here to append items from range() into a results list.

5. Matching Names to Scores

• enumerate() could be helpful here.
• If both lists are the same length and sorted the same way, could you use the index from one to retrieve a value from the other?

6. A "Perfect" Score

• There may be or may not be a student with a score of 100, and you can't return [] without checking all scores.
• The control flow statements continue and break may be useful here to move past unwanted values.