Yea, they're initiating correctly. My guess is that you're trying to refer to a global variable instead of encapsulating the key and alphabet in the constructor.

No problem. I'm hoping that Codewars will support Python 3 in the future.

Also, when you click Train on a kata it says "Supported Python version is 2.7.6" at the bottom of the Instructions tab.

Could it be because Codewars uses Python 2.7?

# Python 2
>>> 1 / 3
0
>>> 1 / float(3)
0.3333333333333333

# Python 3
>>> 1 / 3
0.3333333333333333
>>> 1 // 3
0

http://www.codewars.com/docs/python-environment

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1439189