How does the 'not' keyword work in this code? I'm trying to understand if 'not' reverses the value of 'out_of_guesses'

Question

# Create a guessing game about your name, make the user have three tries only and end the game if the user cannot guess the answer in three tries.

answer = "jay"
guess = ""
guess_count = 0
guess_limit = 3
out_of_guesses = False

while guess.lower() != answer and not out_of_guesses:
    if guess_count < guess_limit:
        guess = input("What's my name? ")
        guess_count += 1
    else:
        out_of_guesses = True

if out_of_guesses:
    print("You lose. ")
else:
    print("You win. ")

I assigned a variable called out_of_guesses in this case; however, the while statement should use the not keyword and reverse the variable out_of_guesses to True. This isn’t the case however because if the not keyword reversed the second condition to True then it would not exit the loop when out_of_guesses was True. Basically, what I’m asking is how does the while loop read the not statement? Am I misunderstanding something and how?

Asked By: ege.exe

||

Source

Answer 1

Perhaps you would better understand the logical expression if we inverted the sense of the boolean you have created:

...
have_more_guesses = True

while guess.lower() != answer and have_more_guesses:
    if guess_count < guess_limit:
        guess = input("What's my name? ")
        guess_count += 1
    else:
        have_more_guesses = False

if have_more_guesses:
    print("You win. ")
else:
    print("You lose. ")

Note how I’ve inverted all the stages: the initialisation, the update and the final test.

This reads: "While you don’t have the right answer, but you have more guesses keep guessing."

Answered By: quamrana

How does the 'not' keyword work in this code? I'm trying to understand if 'not' reverses the value of 'out_of_guesses'

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