Page 40 - Programming the Raspberry Pi Getting Started with Python

This program will work. Try it out. However, it is a little bigger than it should be. We are having to
repeat the following lines twice—once before the loop starts and once inside the loop:

A well-known principle in programming is DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself). Although it’s not a

concern in a little program like this, as programs get more complex, you need to avoid the situation
where the same code is used in more than one place, which makes the programs difficult to maintain.
We can use the command break to shorten the code and make it a bit “drier.” When Python
encounters the command break, it breaks out of the loop. Here is the program again, this time using
break:

The condition for staying in the loop is permanently set to True. The loop will continue until it gets
to break, which will only happen after throwing a double 6.
Summary
You should now be happy to play with IDLE, trying things out in the Python Shell. I strongly

recommend that you try altering some of the examples from this chapter, changing the code and
seeing how that affects what the programs do.
In the next chapter, we will move on past numbers to look at some of the other types of data you can
work with in Python.