# Point Mutations Calculate the Hamming difference between two DNA strands. A mutation is simply a mistake that occurs during the creation or copying of a nucleic acid, in particular DNA. Because nucleic acids are vital to cellular functions, mutations tend to cause a ripple effect throughout the cell. Although mutations are technically mistakes, a very rare mutation may equip the cell with a beneficial attribute. In fact, the macro effects of evolution are attributable by the accumulated result of beneficial microscopic mutations over many generations. The simplest and most common type of nucleic acid mutation is a point mutation, which replaces one base with another at a single nucleotide. By counting the number of differences between two homologous DNA strands taken from different genomes with a common ancestor, we get a measure of the minimum number of point mutations that could have occurred on the evolutionary path between the two strands. This is called the 'Hamming distance' GAGCCTACTAACGGGAT CATCGTAATGACGGCCT ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^^ The Hamming distance between these two DNA strands is 7. # Implementation notes The Hamming distance is only defined for sequences of equal length. Hence you may assume that only sequences of equal length will be passed to your hamming distance function. **Note: This problem is deprecated, replaced by the one called `hamming`.** ## Submitting Exercises Note that, when trying to submit an exercise, make sure the solution is in the `exercism/python/` directory. For example, if you're submitting `bob.py` for the Bob exercise, the submit command would be something like `exercism submit /python/bob/bob.py`. For more detailed information about running tests, code style and linting, please see the [help page](http://exercism.io/languages/python). ## Source The Calculating Point Mutations problem at Rosalind [http://rosalind.info/problems/hamm/](http://rosalind.info/problems/hamm/) ## Submitting Incomplete Solutions It's possible to submit an incomplete solution so you can see how others have completed the exercise.