Question

I am currently trying to implement Conway’s Game of Life in a Code, and therefore built a function which generates the coordinates depending of the size of the window.

def coords_maker(num_x, num_y):

    num_x += 1  
    num_y += 1  
    coords = []
    for i in range (0,num_y, 1):    
        for n in range (0,num_x,1):
            coords.append ('x'+str(n)+'y'+str(i))   
    return coords

Yet, I would like to randomly assign values to the resulting strings, to mark them either as alive (1) or dead (0). However they only way to convert a string to a variable name known to me is via a dict and var(), but however, it is essential for the further code that the coordinates stay sorted, as I want to be able to iterate over the ordered items and put the cursor accordingly to the coordinates name. Something like:

print ('\033['+X_COORD+';'+Y_COORD+'f'+ x1y5) 

if e.g. x1y5 is the corresponding value (0 or 1) of the variable

Is there a convenient method how to either do this via a dict or how to convert the name of the strings to variable names?
Or probably. If I keep one dict and one list and store the coordinate names in the list and the values in the dict?

Thank you in advance!
kyril

Answer 1

You use a dictionary:

def coords_maker(num_x, num_y):

    num_x += 1  
    num_y += 1  
    coords = {}
    for i in range (0,num_y, 1):    
        for n in range (0,num_x,1):
            coords['x'+str(n)+'y'+str(i)] = 0
    return coords

You then access the value with

 coords[x][y]

And change it like so:

 coords[x][y] = 1

Now, of course this converting of coordinates to strings is completely pointless. Simply use a list of lists:

def coords_maker(num_x, num_y):

    num_x += 1  
    num_y += 1  
    coords = [[0]*num_x for x in range(num_y)]
    return coords

And I don’t know why you add 1 to the coordinates either:

def coords_maker(num_x, num_y):
    return [[0]*num_x for x in range(num_y)]