Question

I’m following this guide and I can’t get a basic function to work.

birthday2.py

def happyBirthdayEmily(): #program does nothing as written
    print("Happy Birthday to you!")
    print("Happy Birthday to you!")
    print("Happy Birthday, dear Emily.")
    print("Happy Birthday to you!")

So following the guide I type this:

>>>import birthday2
>>>happyBirthdayEmily

This is the error I get:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
NameError: name 'happyBirthdayEmily' is not defined

What Am I missing here?

Answer 1

You are missing parentheses after happyBirthdayEmily and a module reference. Do it like this:

>>>birthday2.happyBirthdayEmily()

The parens identify it as a function call, and the birthday2. at the beginning just says, “Use the function happyBirthdayEmily() from the birthday2 module.” This is structured like this, because if you had another function (not in birthday2) that was also called happyBirthdayEmily(), the python interpreter basically wouldn’t know which one to use.