In the last post introducing Python, I demonstrated how to make a simple app using variables and conditional statements. In order to do anything really powerful in a given programming language though, ...

Python, for all its power and popularity, has long lacked a form of flow control found in other languages—a way to take a value and match it elegantly against one of a number of possible conditions.

The Python programming language, despite its ease of use, offers a depth of useful functions, modules and data structures. One of these data structures, the "dictionary" data structure, functions as a ...