abort.py: is sorted(...)[2] meant as the median of five?

[dab00gieman]

python-study-Neo_1/python-quest/answers/abort.py:

def abort(a, b, c, d, e):
    numbers = sorted([a, b, c, d, e])
    return numbers[2]

Prompt #1 says abort "returns the middle value of five integers after sorting them", so index 2 of the sorted five is the median — clever and compact. Is that hardcoded [2] the intended definition, or would you generalize it, e.g. numbers[len(numbers)//2] if this ever took a variable number of arguments? Also curious: any edge behavior worth documenting for duplicates (e.g. abort(2, 2, 2, 1, 3) returns 2)?

[mgkvibez]

Yes — with exactly five arguments, sorted(...)[2] is the median, so the compact form is correct against prompt #1 as written. Index 2 of a sorted 5-tuple is definitionally the middle value; there's no off-by-one.

The hardcoded index is only "fragile" relative to the signature: abort(a, b, c, d, e) is fixed at five, so the [2] and the signature are consistent — I'd leave it as the intended definition and treat any signature change as out of scope for this exercise.

If you ever wanted the general form (partly because the piscine-style prompts encourage seeing the pattern), it's:

def abort(*nums):
    return sorted(nums)[len(nums) // 2]

— same idea, median of N via N // 2 after sorting, and it degrades gracefully to even counts (upper median) rather than raising IndexError. But for this repo's answer file, the five-arg [2] version is the better teaching artifact since it matches the prompt exactly.