argument

A quick recap:
We’re cracking on well here, going through the Python course on Coursera as taught by Dr. Chuck (see footnotes for more info and links). We’ve looked a strings and how we can slice, dice and extract data from them using find and split functions. We’ve gone on to learn about files, and proceeded to open and read data from files, both as strings and as lists. We’ve been able to index lists using integer values from zero upwards. Then we’ve gone on to look at dictionaries, which are mini two-field databases of key/value pairs referenced using their keys. And all throughout we’ve been learning about and using various kinds of loops or iterations, conditional statements, and functions (both built-in and defined in-program).

And now for something completely different:
All these things were familiar to me from programming in school and as a maths undergrad (albeit a little rusty!). But now we come on to something completely different, something I hadn’t heard of before: tuples. I’ll call tuples the big brother of lists as they’re very similar to lists: they’re basically another type of collection of things. [Read more…] about Coding 101 (part 8)

This post follows on from my earlier posts Coding 101 (part 1) and (part 2), and is my responses and learnings from the highly-recommended Python programming book and course by Charles Severance (see References below).

Functions:
Functions are sections of code (a sequence of executable steps) which we want to be able to use and re-use at many points in our program. It may be that we want to read and process a whole range of data over and over (but the process done to all the data is the same) or maybe there are a number of inputs required from the user which all need to be processed the same way. Rather than rewriting the same lines of code again and again in our program, we can give that section of code a name (known as ‘defining the function’). We can then ‘call’ that named function, that is, ask Python to execute the defined sequence of steps, at any future point within our program, and as many times as we want. (In other programming languages this same functionality may be referred to as sub-programs or sub-routines.) [Read more…] about Coding 101 (part 3)