A sentinel value is a special value used to terminate a loop when reading data. In the following program, test scores are provided (via user input). Once the sentinel value of -1 is input, the loop terminates. At that point, the average of the test scores will be printed.
See Also
Reduce costs for Microsoft SentinelSentinelMicrosoft Sentinel Reviews, Competitors and PricingPrerequisites for deploying Microsoft Sentinel# 02Loops example_08 SentinalValue.pyscore = input("enter a test score, use -1 to stop ") #enter the first valuetotal = 0scoreCounter = 0 while score != -1: #loop until the sentinel value (-1) is entered total = total + score scoreCounter = scoreCounter + 1 score = input("enter a test score, use -1 to stop ") print ("The average for the test is ",total/scoreCounter)This problem can be extended in a number of ways.
- Ask students to maintain the minimum and maximum score in the while loop.
- Ask students to store the values input in a list which can then be sorted and analyzed (e.g., determine the median score, 25% percentile, the score that appears most often).
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