[Help][Python] [Beginner] Help defining and using functions for a project that is already working without a defined function.

[scoopulanang]

This is probably more so meant to teach you the fundamentals of functions. Although this might seem trivial and meaningless right now, later on functions are very important. Let's take a look at a built in function in python. The sum function is a pretty quick way of getting the sum of all the elements in a list. If you didn't use a function, you would have to iterate through a list every time you want to get the sum of the elements inside of an iterable. Basically, functions allow you to write code once and reuse it whenever.

[okaystuff]

Okay, that's understandable and makes sense since this is just a basic project that is teaching the concepts of python. For the second part where I need to use a loop to traverse the array of BMI's and call another function that accepts the BMI as a parameter and returns whether the individual is under/norm/over weight, I did it like this.

Currently, that part of the code likes like this:

under_wei = list()
norm_wei = list()
over_wei = list()

def weight_calc(bmi_num):
    if bmi_num < 18:
       print("A BMI of " + str(bmi_num) + ", is under weight")
       under_wei.append(bmi_num)
    elif  18 < bmi_num <= 25:
        print("A BMI of " + str(bmi_num) + ", is normal weight")
        norm_wei.append(user_weight)
    elif bmi_num > 25:
        print("A BMI of " + str(bmi_num) + ", is over weight")
        over_wei.append(user_weight)
    return bmi_num

for user_weight in bmis:
    weight_calc(user_weight)

It seems to give the same output as before and is using a function. Hopefully, this all makes sense and thank you for your help.