Question

Hello, I've looked at the textbook "How to Think Like a Computer Scientist," and in chapter 3.6 "New Functions," it instructs on how to do the newLine function. I tried to follow the instructions and got something like this.
>>> def newLine():
print('First Line.')
newLine()
print('Second Line.')

However, when I actually put the program to use, instead of giving me,
First line.

Second line.

it gives me First Line on an infinite loop. Could someone help me on this? Thank you.

Answer 1

The presentation in the text is misleading. If you write it the way you have you (as a recursive call of the same function) then you will get an infinite loop because it won't know where to end. What the text means is code like this:


def newLine():
print


print('First Line')
newLine()
print('Second Line')
newLine()
print('Third Line')

The first two lines define a function called 'newLine'. The only thing that the function does print an empty line. Then we call the function twice to insert a blank line between the first and second lines.

Answer 2

Thank you! Your explanation is very clear.