Example: dice_roll()

Now suppose we wish to write a function that rolls a die for us. We would like to be able to write code like this,

total = dice_roll() + dice_roll()

to simulate rolling a pair of dice. What can we tell by looking at this code?

• the name of our function will be dice_roll
• it takes no arguments (because there is nothing inside the brackets)
• it returns something that can be added together and stored (so not None).

This leads to the code,

def dice_roll():
    return random.randint(1,6)

which we could use like this,

import random

def dice_roll():
    return random.randint(1,6)

total = dice_roll() + dice_roll()
print("On your first roll you got:", total)

This code works, but could be improved by being generalized to dice with other than six sides like these (with 4, 6, 8, 12, 20 and 10 sides respectively),

We can do that by having our function take an argument specifying the number of sides,

import random

def dice_roll(sides):
    return random.randint(1,sides)

total = dice_roll(6) + dice_roll(6)
print("On your first roll you got:", total)