Selecting Parameters for the Simulation

00:00 While you can hard-code the parameters for the simulation, wouldn’t it be easier to let the user do that at runtime? Maybe the manager would like to do a what-if using your model to see if it’s worthwhile to hire an additional usher, or, if someone calls in sick, to see if moving an employee from the cashier station to concessions would cause a large impact on wait times.

00:21 So to do this, go ahead and define a new function called get_user_input(), and then ask the user how many cashiers—which will be "Input # of cashiers working: ".

00:37 The num_servers is going to be input("Input # of servers working: "). And then the num_ushers, which will be input("Input # of ushers working: ").

00:58 Okay! Then you can say params is just going to be a list of this, so [num_users, num_servers, num_ushers], And then if all(), and then say the string of each is a digit for i in params.

01:21 And this is just to check that the inputs are valid integers. You can then say params is going to be a list comprehension of the integer of each, because input() is going to return a string.

01:37 Otherwise, go ahead and print a little error message, something like "Could not parse input. The simulation will use default values".

01:53 And then these default values—so do a newline ("\n") and they’re going to be "1 cashier, 1 server, 1 usher." And then set params = [1, 1, 1].

02:09 And once this is all completed, go ahead and return those parameters. And that’s all there is to it! A few lines of code in a relatively straightforward function makes the entire script much easier to work with later on.