The Buridan's donkey in python

Francesco Mecca — Sat, 02 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

During the final weeks of my exam session I started reading a bit about python 3 using an excellent book: Dive into Python. When I noted that python uses the Mersenne Twister PRNG as well I decided to write another version of my Buridan's donkey program.

.. code:: python

    import random, sys

    if __name__ == '__main__':
        args = list()
        if not sys.stdin.isatty():
            for line in sys.stdin:
                if line[-1] is '\n':
                    line = line[:-1]
                args.append(line)
        else:
            args = sys.argv[1:]
        argRange = len(args)
        for i in range(argRange):
            print(str(i+1) + '.', args.pop(random.randrange(0, len(args))))

This script works in a different way than the one in c++. Rather than shuffling a list made by the entries in the arguments, it pops randomly one entry from the list till the list is empty.

Not satisfied enough, I wrote also a telegram bot using the telebot library that works as the script above but inside the telegram app. The bot can be added to your contact list by simply searching for @duridan_donkey_bot (yes, a typo!)

All the code is opensource and can be found on my github page.

Francesco Mecca

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The Buridan's donkey in python