14 Monday Oct 2024
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For many, fall means back to school, so for this blog I thought I’d return to Simple Tricks in Python. Fall also means Halloween for many, so hopefully these tricks will be treats, even if they do involve some very basic Python.
In this post, I explore some of Python’s more interesting and useful built-in functions, such as enumerate, sorted, reversed, map, and filter.
30 Monday Sep 2024
Some of you may have encountered the Logo programming language or one of its many offshoots. A memorable aspect of Logo was its use of turtle graphics — a form of vector graphics similar to pen plotters. Notably, turtle graphics features a relative drawing cursor.
Standard Python includes a turtle graphics module. It doesn’t have a huge production value (there’s no easy way to save an image, for instance), but it can be fun to play with.
16 Monday Sep 2024
I’ve never been particularly interested in puzzle games. Figuring out software has filled that niche for me (plenty puzzling enough). So, I’ve never done a Sudoku puzzle. Recently I read a post about Tredoku, which is a kind of three-dimensional Sudoku.
In that post was an unsolved Tredoku puzzle. I wasn’t tempted to try to solve it myself, but I did think it might be fun to see if I could write some Python to do it.
02 Monday Sep 2024
The famous Fibonacci sequence starts off [1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, …] and continues forever. Each number in the series, except the first two, is the sum of the previous two numbers. For example, 3+5=8.
The canonical algorithm to calculate the series uses recursion and is elegant enough to be a common example of a recursive function. But while elegant conceptually, the algorithm is deadly computationally. In this post I’ll look at several ways to dodge the bullet.
19 Monday Aug 2024
I recently learned about Bloom filters (and was then able to fully understand the joke in this xkcd comic). While I don’t have a good application for them myself, I found them interesting enough to play around with a little.
Python uses them under the hood in a way that has some potential for other applications. In this post I’ll explain Bloom filter basics and go over some simple implementations.
05 Monday Aug 2024
Posted in Python
Simple Tricks started late last year with a “project” post that may have been a misfire, though it’s possible I’ll do some other simple projects in the future (though my question is whether they’re really “simple tricks” — I’m not sure the first post in the series qualified).
Regardless, since then we’ve looked at Python comprehensions (see here and here), file handling techniques (see here and here), and function parameters (see here and here). This time we look at printing output with an emphasis on formatted output.
22 Monday Jul 2024
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The previous post in this Simple Tricks series began an exploration into function parameters and arguments. (Parameters are what a function declares it takes. Arguments are values passed at runtime.)
We covered optional arguments with defaults and variable arity functions. We left off with variable arity keyword parameters and a synchronization problem.
08 Monday Jul 2024
Posted in Python
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The last two posts in this Simple Tricks series (Tricks #4 and Tricks #5) explored the basics of file handling. The two before that (Tricks #2 and Tricks #3) explored Python list comprehensions.
This time we’ll explore something extremely basic, passing parameters to functions. Python has interesting native capabilities that give programmers options in how they deal with function parameters.
22 Saturday Jun 2024
Posted in Python
Last time we looked at dealing with files in Python, looked into filename handling, and left off after creating a couple of base classes to support general file operations.
This time we’ll extend those classes into some useful file utility classes for handling data from different types of files (for instance, binary, plain text, line-oriented text, and any type of structured file).
08 Saturday Jun 2024
Posted in Python
The last two posts looked at Python list comprehensions. [See Simple Tricks #2 and Simple Tricks #3] This time we look at file handling, one of the most common tasks programmers deal with, especially with script languages such as Python.
Python’s native file object, created with the built in open function, is simple and easy, but here are some tricks that make file access even simpler and easier.
The Hard-Core Coder 