Find min, max, and average of a list

from __future__ import divisionsomelist =  [1,12,2,53,23,6,17] max_value = max(somelist)min_value = min(somelist)avg_value = 0 if len(somelist) == 0 else sum(somelist)/len(somelist)

If you want to manually find the minimum as a function:

somelist =  [1,12,2,53,23,6,17] def my_min_function(somelist):    min_value = None    for value in somelist:        if not min_value:            min_value = value        elif value < min_value:            min_value = value    return min_value

Python 3.4 introduced the statistics package, which provides mean and additional stats:

from statistics import mean, mediansomelist =  [1,12,2,53,23,6,17]avg_value = mean(somelist)median_value = median(somelist)

Return min and max value in tuple:

def side_values(num_list):    results_list = sorted(num_list)    return results_list[0], results_list[-1]somelist = side_values([1,12,2,53,23,6,17])print(somelist)

Only a teacher would ask you to do something silly like this.You could provide an expected answer. Or a unique solution, while the rest of the class will be (yawn) the same...

from operator import lt, gtdef ultimate (l,op,c=1,u=0):    try:        if op(l[c],l[u]):             u = c        c += 1        return ultimate(l,op,c,u)    except IndexError:        return l[u]def minimum (l):    return ultimate(l,lt)def maximum (l):    return ultimate(l,gt)

The solution is simple. Use this to set yourself apart from obvious choices.