Hello,
I just finished the currency exchange exercise. The exercise itself is straight forward, and the explanations are excellent (seriously!), but I managed to confuse myself, and I spent a bit of time trying to understand why.
It was only after I got the last task wrong that I realized that I had spent the entire exercise assuming that the number_of_bills thing had to do with the original currency.
In retrospect (a) this is a totally silly assumption, and (b) the instructions clearly state that The total you receive must be divisible by the value of one “bill” or unit. (Emphasis added)
However, I was paying a lot more attention to the code than the instructions, and in the code it says:
def get_number_of_bills(budget, denomination):
"""
:param budget: float - the amount of money you are planning to exchange.
:param denomination: int - the value of a single bill.
:return: int - number of bills after exchanging all your money.
"""
pass
The key bit that I think led me down the garden path was the name budget and the description the amount of money you are planning to exchange. To me budget definitely has the flavor of the amount of money that I’m starting out with, rather than the amount of money that I receive after making the exchange.
I can think of two ways to tweak this.
- Make sure the two methods are clearly talking about what you have/receive after the exchange.
- Go more generic, and not talk about which side of the exchange it’s on (since technically it works for any currency). So instead of
budget, maybeamountorfundsortotal_value.
Here’s an example of what “more generic” could look like:
def get_value_of_bills(denomination, number_of_bills):
"""
:param denomination: int - the value of a bill.
:param number_of_bills: int - number of bills of that denomination.
:return: int - total value of the bills.
"""
pass
def get_number_of_bills(amount, denomination):
"""
:param amount: float - the total amount of money available.
:param denomination: int - the value of a single bill.
:return: int - number of bills that can be obtained with the available funds.
"""
pass
The second thing that I was confused about was the exchangeable_value(). I assumed that exchangeable meant the amount that could be exchanged. In other words, I thought this was about the original currency rather than the target currency. After reading through the task description a few times I did figure it out, but I wonder if there’s a name that would help make it clearer that it’s about the target currency after the exchange. I can’t think of anything great off the top of my head, but maybe something like obtainable_value?
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
If, after discussing this the community does come up with better names, I’d be happy to submit a pull request adjusting the exercise.
welcome to the Exercism forums!