The Python Apprentice

Booking seats

Now we can proceed with implementing a simple booking system. For each flight we simply need to keep track of who is sitting in each seat. We'll represent the seat allocations using a list of dictionaries. The list will contain one entry for each seat row, and each entry will be a dictionary mapping from seat-letter to occupant name. If a seat is unoccupied, the corresponding dictionary value will contain None.

We initialize the seating plan in Flight.__init__() using this fragment:

rows, seats = self._aircraft.seating_plan()self._seating = [None] + [{letter: None for letter in seats} for _ in rows]

In the first line we retrieve the seating plan for the aircraft and use tuple unpacking to put the row and seat identifiers into ...