Rule #6: Always Define Literals

23 Monday Jun 2025

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It has been more than a few minutes since I posted a Coding Rule, so I thought it was high time I did. There are at least two things I’ve previously written about as important but didn’t elevate to Rules. Both have been bugging me; they should be rules. Today (and a week from now) I’m correcting that oversight.

To be honest, this Rule is so important, I’m not sure why I didn’t make it the third one. Rule #1 and Rule #2 are definitely more important, but the ones currently listed as #3 – #5 are not as important as today’s (they are very important, though).

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Cellular Automaton Redux

12 Monday May 2025

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In the previous post [see Elementary Cellular Automaton], I presented an implementation of a 1D elementary cellular automaton. Unfortunately, the code turned out to be an example of leaping into an idea without carefully reading the background information.

Long story short, while the code works and generates images, it doesn’t generate the correct images for all 256 rules. In this post, I present improved code that does.

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Elementary Cellular Automaton

28 Monday Apr 2025

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For quite some time, I’ve wanted to write some Python code to implement and elementary cellular automaton. In particular, I wanted to “investigate” (play around with) the famous Rule 110, which is known to be Turing complete.

Despite the name, this has nothing to do with cellphones. It’s a 1D variation on the well-known 2D Game of Life designed by British mathematician John Conway. [See the John Conway’s Life and Life With Class posts for Python versions]

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Simple Python Tricks #15

31 Monday Mar 2025

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The political situation in the USA has dampened my mood and crashed my interest in this Simple Tricks series, but in hope of getting at least one post out this month (and on the very last day, no less), I’m going to revisit two topics I’ve written about before.

Back in Issue #8 of this series, I wrote about formatted output (to screen or file), especially using format strings (“f-strings”) and the format function and built-in method. In this issue, I’ll revisit the latter for a more sophisticated example. I also have some goodies for the str.translate method.

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Simple Python Tricks #14

17 Monday Feb 2025

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This post was meant to be the final edition of Simple Tricks in 2024. My every-other-Monday schedule had it slotted for December 23rd. But I came down with a respiratory virus on the 22nd. The post wasn’t complete at that point, so I pushed publication to the following Monday, the 30th, but I was sick until well into the new year.

I ended up taking January off from the web (and computers in general), and it’s not until now that I’ve caught up with myself. In any event, I’m not sure how many more of these Simple Tricks posts I’ll do, but here’s one more.
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Simple Python Tricks #13

09 Monday Dec 2024

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The last few posts in this Simple Tricks series were perhaps a bit less than simple, so this month, here at the end of the year, I’m going to take it easy and enjoy the season. (I hope you are doing so as well!)

I’ve put together a random grab bag of little bits and pieces of Python. Nothing too complicated. And in all honesty, probably nothing terribly interesting or that useful, either. But you may find some of the approaches helpful.

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Simple Python Tricks #12

25 Monday Nov 2024

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The last two Simple Tricks posts looked at subclasses of built-in Python classes, in particular the tuple class, as well as the built-in class methods Python supports for any user-defined class. [See Simple Tricks #10 and Simple Tricks #11.]

This time I narrow the focus to real and virtual object attributes, the “x”, “y”, “z” elements of our vector objects. Python offers many ways to implement these, depending (as always) on what you want.

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Simple Python Tricks #11

11 Monday Nov 2024

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Last time we looked at subclassing the Python built-in classes tuple, list, and dict with a focus on the built-in __new__ and __init__ methods (and never forget to include __str__ and/or __repr__ in your user-defined classes).

This time Simple Tricks explores many of the other built-in methods that help you create richly featured Python-aware objects. Specifically, we’ll focus on subclassing tuple to create (immutable) vector objects. A basic understanding of object-oriented programming is assumed.

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Simple Python Tricks #10

28 Monday Oct 2024

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Last time, Simple Tricks looked at some built-in Python functions. This time, we look at three built-in Python container classes, tuple, list, and dict, with a focus on designing useful sub-classes based on them.

We’ll explore the built-in __new__ and __init__ methods in detail along with some of the other built-in methods that help you to create rich new types. [The reader is assumed to be familiar with the basics of object-oriented programming.]

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Simple Python Tricks #9

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.

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