9 Dial-a-Curse: Generating random insults from lists of words

“He or she is a slimy-sided, frog-mouthed, silt-eating slug with the brains of a turtle.”

--Dial-A-Curse

Random events are at the heart of interesting games and puzzles. Humans quickly grow bored of things that are always the same. I think one reason people may choose to have pets and children is to inject some randomness into their lives. Let’s learn how to make our programs more interesting by having them behave differently each time they are run.

This exercise will show you how to randomly select one or more elements from lists of options. To explore randomness, we’ll create a program called abuse.py that will insult the user by randomly selecting adjectives and nouns to create slanderous epithets.

In order to test randomness, though, we need to control it. It turns out that “random” events on computers are rarely truly random but only pseudo-random, which means we can control them by using a “seed.”1 Each time you use the same seed, you will get the same “random” choices!

Shakespeare had some of the best insults, so we’ll draw from the vocabulary of his works. Here is the list of adjectives you should use:

9.2 Writing abuse.py

9.1.1 Validating arguments

9.1.2 Importing and seeding the random module

9 Dial-a-Curse: Generating random insults from lists of words

9.2 Writing abuse.py

9.1.1 Validating arguments

9.1.2 Importing and seeding the random module

9.1.3 Defining the adjectives and nouns

9.1.4 Taking random samples and choices

9.1.5 Formatting the output

9.2 Solution

9.3 Discussion

9.3.1 Defining the arguments

9.3.2 Using parser.error()

9.3.3 Program exit values and STDERR

9.3.4 Controlling randomness with random.seed()

9.3.5 Iterating with range() and using throwaway variables

9.3.6 Constructing the insults