multiplication of non integer and integer in a list

Write a program to keep track of how much profit you make. You make $0.25 on each apple, $0.50 on each orange, $0.75 on each banana, and $0.35 on each strawberry. Return an integer representing the profit of fruits.

This is what I did and I received the error was: can't multiply sequence by non-int of type 'float'

def sellFruits(fruits):
  fruitL = []
  a = [0] * .25
  o = [1] * .50
  b = [2] * .75
  s = [3] * .35
  totalFruitProfit = a + o + b + s
  return totalFruitProfit

Test case:

fruits = [1, 1, 1, 1]
profit = sellFruits(fruits)
print profit
1.85

Solution

I think what you're looking for is:

def sellFruits(fruits):
  a = fruits[0] * .25
  o = fruits[1] * .50
  b = fruits[2] * .75
  s = fruits[3] * .35
  totalFruitProfit = a + o + b + s
  return totalFruitProfit

There were several things you were doing that didn't really make sense:

You weren't using the fruits parameter anywhere
You were creating fruitL = [] and then doing nothing with it
[0] * .25 is creating a list, with one item (an integer 0), and trying to multiply that sequence¹ by .25. If you were trying to index some list, it wasn't happening.

So I added fruits before each set of brackets. This way, you're accessing the 0th, 1st, etc. item of the fruits list being passed to sellFruits.

Note the difference in what I changed:

[0] creates a list, with one item, 0.
fruits[0] accesses the first item in list (or any sequence, tuple, ...) fruits.

1 - Multiplying a sequence by an integer duplicates the sequence that many times. [0] * 4, for example, yields [0,0,0,0].