Python for Secret Agents

Organizing our software

Python gives us a number of ways to organize software into conceptual units. Long, sprawling scripts are hard to read, repair, or extend. Python offers us packages, modules, classes, and functions. We'll see different organizing techniques throughout our agent training. We'll start with function definition.

We've used a number of Python's built-in functions in the previous sections. Defining our own function is something we do with the def statement. A function definition allows us to summarize (and in some cases generalize) some processing. Here's a simple function we can use to get a decimal value from a user:

def get_decimal(prompt): value= None while value is None: entry= input(prompt) try: value= Decimal(entry) except ...