Question

When I call random.randint(), I get the following error. Can anyone please explain what’s happening?

$ python 
Python 2.6.6 (r266:84292, Dec 27 2010, 00:02:40) 
[GCC 4.4.5] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import random
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "random.py", line 4, in <module>
    print >>file,random.randint(100,10000)
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'randint'
>>> random.randint(100)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
NameError: name 'random' is not defined

Answer 1

You’ve called a script “random.py”. Rename it so that it isn’t shadowing the stdlib module of the same name.