I've just started this course and I have the book.

I did the finger exercise after section 2.2 and am quite pleased that it works.

The finger exercise after section 2.4 seems to be solvable by the same method, but it becomes tedious to enter and compare 10 variables. I wanted to do it with only 2 variables and a loop. I was able to, but only by setting the initial value of one variable to an arbitrary low negative value. This seems a bit of a cheat. Is there a more elegant way to do this?

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print 'Given ten integers, this program will tell the highest odd.'

count = 0
y = -999999999999

for count in range (0, 10):
x = int(raw_input('Enter an integer.'))
if x=y and (abs(x)%2)==1:
y = x
count = count + 1

if y ==-999999999999:
print 'All of the inputs are even.'
else:
print y, 'is the greatest odd.'

Question

I've just started this course and I have the book.

I did the finger exercise after section 2.2 and am quite pleased that it works.

The finger exercise after section 2.4 seems to be solvable by the same method, but it becomes tedious to enter and compare 10 variables.  I wanted to do it with only 2 variables and a loop.  I was able to, but only by setting the initial value of one variable to an arbitrary low negative value.  This seems a bit of a cheat.  Is there a more elegant way to do this?

-------------------

print 'Given ten integers, this program will tell the highest odd.'

count = 0
y = -999999999999

for count in range (0, 10):
    x = int(raw_input('Enter an integer.'))
    if x>=y and (abs(x)%2)==1:
        y = x
    count = count + 1

if y ==-999999999999:
    print 'All of the inputs are even.'
else:
    print y, 'is the greatest odd.'