Here’s a Python gotcha that got me. Here is my function to print out a range of sinusoidal values:

import math

def cycle(centre, range):
        theta = 4.71
        speed = 0.1
        for i in range(0,80):
                theta = theta + speed
                value = centre + (range * math.sin(theta))
                print value

I got the following error which confused the hell out of me:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "cycle2.py", line 11, in 
    cycle(0.0,10.0)
  File "cycle2.py", line 6, in cycle
    for i in range(0,80):
TypeError: 'float' object is not callable

Can you see it? It took me a while. I’d assigned a variable called range and then tried to call the range() function. I’d overloaded a built-in function. Duh!

I just had to rename my variable and it was good.