Greedy Coin Changer

Noah Gift over on O’Reilly OnLamp Blog has an article on building a greedy coin changer. That is, given a value, say 71 cents, calculate the fewest coins needed to make the amount. He had listed a number of solutions, but I felt I could do it a bit more pythonic. 😉

#!/usr/bin/env python
"""implement a greedy coin changer, returning the
fewest coins to make the change requested."""
#coin_list can be expanded to include silver dollars 
# and 50 cent pieces by just expanding the coin list
# to [100,50,25,10,5,1] the reulting answer 
#structure will modify itself to reflect 

coin_list = [25,10,5,1]
change_requested = .71
remaining = change_requested * 100 
change_returned = []    #result structure

for coin in coin_list:
    num_coins,remaining =  divmod(remaining,coin)
    change_returned.append(int(num_coins))
    
print change_returned
print remaining

The benefits of this version, are no conditional logic is needed, the coin structure can be modified and the answer will modify itself accordingly.