guess-game.py: is the free retry on invalid input a deliberate design choice?

[dab00gieman]

In answers/guess-game.py:

try:
    guess = int(input("Enter your guess: "))
except ValueError:
    print("⚠️  Please enter a valid number! Try again.\n")
    continue

guesses_taken += 1
guesses_left -= 1

A typo doesn't cost a guess, since continue skips the decrements — nice for the player, but is that deliberate or a side effect of the ordering? Also, guesses_taken and guesses_left always sum to 7 (guesses_taken + guesses_left == 7), so one of them is redundant — is guesses_taken kept just for the win message, or was one meant to count invalid attempts too? Side question: 7 guesses for 1..100 is exactly ceil(log2(100)) — optimal binary search. Was that the math behind choosing 7?

[mgkvibez]

As written it's a side effect of continue skipping the decrements — but it's a side effect worth keeping, and I'd promote it to a documented design choice.

The case for deliberate: charging a guess for a parse failure is hostile to the player — the game is about guessing numbers, not typing under pressure. The guess budget should count decisions about the number, not keystroke errors. Most guess-the-number implementations and Mastermind-style games don't charge for non-parse input either.

The case against: infinite non-loss retries technically let a player grind forever without losing (though they can't win either, so the exploit is harmless), and the behavior is currently implicit — nothing in the code says "this is a rule."

So: keep the behavior, make it a rule in the code:

except ValueError:
    # Deliberate: a typo doesn't cost a guess — only real guesses count.
    print("⚠️  Please enter a valid number! Try again.\n")
    continue

If you ever want the strict variant (typos cost), the minimal change is moving the decrements above the try/except — but I'd argue that makes the game strictly worse and the comment is the better fix.