Question

Code below, not sure what i’m doing wrong. It is an employee database. The below inherits from from the Employee class. Not really sure what to do to get it to pass, unless my code is just wrong. I get this error ” SyntaxError: non-keyword arg after keyword arg”

class Manager(EmpSalaried): #inherits from EmpSalaried 
    def __init__(self, salary=0.0, firstName="", lastName="", ssID="", DOB=datetime.fromordinal(1), 
            startDate=datetime.today(), 
            manage=[]): #manage attribute added for manager
        Employee.__init__(self, salary, firstName, lastName, ssID, DOB, startDate)
        self.manage = manage


    def __str__(self):
        """
        >>> import datetime
        >>> e = Manager(10, 'Bob', 'Quux', '123', startDate=datetime.datetime(2009, 1, 1),          
        ['Michael', 'Bob', 'Hello'])
        >>> print e
        10, Bob Quux, 123, 0001-01-01 00:00:00, 2009-01-01 00:00:00, Michael, Bob, Hello
        >>> b = Manager(2000, 'Bob', 'Lol', '1234', startDate=datetime.datetime(2009, 1, 1),     
        ['Michael', 'Bob', 'Hello'])
        >>> print b
        2000, Bob Lol, 1234, 0001-01-01 00:00:00, 2009-01-01 00:00:00

        """
        return Employee.__str__(self) + ', ' + str(self.manage) #need to convert to a string in order to add to string

Answer 1

Doctests are formatted in just the same way as you would run an interactive session. You can run an interactive session and just copy it and you’ll get all the results. This might be one valid session:

>>> import datetime
>>> print Manager(10, 'Bob', 'Quux', '123', datetime.datetime(2009, 1, 1),
... ['Michael', 'Bob', 'Hello'])
10, Bob Quux, 123, 0001-01-01 00:00:00, 2009-01-01 00:00:00, Michael, Bob, Hello
>>> print Manager(2000, 'Bob', 'Lol', '1234', datetime.datetime(2009, 1, 1),     
... ['Michael', 'Bob', 'Hello'])
2000, Bob Lol, 1234, 0001-01-01 00:00:00, 2009-01-01 00:00:00

There were assorted syntax errors in what you had done;

• For the doctest part of it, if you’re continuing the statement, the next line must start with ...  (exactly the same as in a regular session);
• Your Manager instantiation was invalid (genuine Python SyntaxError) as you had startDate=... (a keyword argument) followed by a non-keyword argument (the value for “manager”). This is the main problem that stopped it from running. And that’s also what the exception told you.

If you can’t figure it out in a doctest, run it in a normal Python session. Play with it there.

There are also a number of other significant problems in your code; here are a couple of them:

• EmpSalaried versus Employee: what gives with that?
• Due to using a mutable default argument, if you don’t specify the manage argument when creating a Manager, they will get the same list. This is not what you want.