Question

I am trying to solve this CodingBat problem:

Squirrels who like to party get together and smoke cigars. Such a party is only deemed successful when the number of cigars is between 40 and 60, on a weekday. On weekends, however, there is no upper bound on number of cigars. Write a function that returns True if the party with the given values was successful.

Unfortunately, although I have used Python occasionally, I am not good enough at it to understand why my code fails with a syntax error on line 5:

def cigar_party(cigars, is_weekend):
  if is_weekend:
    if cigars >= 40:
      return True
  else if:
    cigars >= 40 and cigars =< 60:
      return True
  else:
    return False

Answer 1

In Python you need to use elif instead of else if.

More information:
http://docs.python.org/2/tutorial/controlflow.html

Also change the following line:

else if:
cigars >= 40 and cigars =< 60:

To this:

elif cigars >= 40 and cigars <= 60:
    return True

The less than or equal to sign needs to be <= and there should not be a colon between the keyword elif and the rest of the expression.