How would you fix the "code smell" of this code?

Hi Cameron,

As Kris has mentioned the issue with this code is that you're repeating the same code. In most cases you want to keep code DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself).

There are actually two tasks to functionally abstract in the example you've posted (1 - square a number, 2 - print a message). Depending on the behavior that you want these could be together in a single function or separated into multiple functions.

So, here's the original:

first_number = 5
first_result = first_number * first_number
print("The number {} squared is {}".format(first_number, first_result))

second_number = 8
second_result = second_number * second_number
print("The number {} squared is {}".format(second_number, second_result))

Let's take a look at doing it all together in one function. What do we want this function to do? It needs to take a number and print the number and its square.

def print_square(number):
        square = number * number
        print("The number {} squared is {}".format(number, square))


print_square(5)
print_square(8)

That's pretty straight-forward, but what if we wanted to use the square for something else? We don't have it anymore in our main scope as square is a local variable to the print_square() function.

We could break this into two functions and still keep things dry

def square(number):
        return number * number


def print_square_message(number, sq):
        print("The number {} squared is {}".format(number, sq))


first_number = 5
second_number = 8
first_square = square(first_number)
second_square = square(second_number)

print_square_message(first_number, first_square)
print_square_message(second_number, second_square)