Inheriting from the list object

kdt

Hi

I have a function for calculating the standard deviation of a list. I was wanting to create this as an object and inherit from pythons list object.

I'm pretty new to the whole OOP concept, can someone please have a look at my code to see why it prints an address rather than a value and where I'm messing this OOP thing up.

Thanks

Aug 14 '07 #1

bvdet

Hi

I have a function for calculating the standard deviation of a list. I was wanting to create this as an object and inherit from pythons list object.

I'm pretty new to the whole OOP concept, can someone please have a look at my code to see why it prints an address rather than a value and where I'm messing this OOP thing up.

Thanks

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1. class StandardDev(list):
2.     def __init__(self, theList):
3.         self.theList = theList
4.  
5.     def standardDev(self):
6.         import math
7.         sums = 0
8.         n = len(self)
9.         #Calculate the mean average
10.         ma = (1/float(n))*sum(self)
11.         for i, j in enumerate(self):
12.             sums += ((self[i]-ma)**2)
13.         return round(math.sqrt((1/float(n))*(sums)),2)
14.  
15.  
16. a = (5,6,8,9)
17.  
18. b = StandardDev(a)
19. print b.standardDev
20.  
21.  

Aug 14 '07 #2

kdt

cheers much again bvdet. your awesome!

Aug 14 '07 #3

kdt

sorry, last question. How best is it to catch integer division by zero errors on this code?

Thanks

Aug 14 '07 #4

bvdet

sorry, last question. How best is it to catch integer division by zero errors on this code?

Thanks

It looks like the only way that could happen is when the list is empty. A simple if statement will take care of that:

Aug 14 '07 #5

kdt

cheers mate :). I was thinking of using try except, but this works fine.

Aug 14 '07 #6

bartonc

It looks like the only way that could happen is when the list is empty. A simple if statement will take care of that:

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1. n = len(self.theList)
2. if n:
3.     ....... do stuff......

Or simply:

Aug 14 '07 #7