03 Saturday Oct 2020
Posted in CS101
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For me, Python modules seem to divide into two basic classes: library modules and application modules. The former contain basic building blocks, but the latter has top-level routines the operating system invokes when it runs the application.
Today I thought I’d post about the application framework I use for all apps.
01 Tuesday Sep 2020
Tags
Cartesian product, Japanese multiplication method, multiplication, Pillow (PIL fork), Python, Python code
On my regular blog I just posted about a Japanese visual multiplication method. It’s a cute trick that ties into the notion of grid multiplication techniques. (In general, multiplication techniques are of some interest due to the Mandelbrot set, which requires multiplying large numbers lots of times.)
It turns out code to generate the patterns was a lot easier than I thought it would be. The hardest part was generating the diagonal summing lines.
07 Thursday May 2020
Posted in Fun
Last time I showed you the functions necessary for Life — for John Conway’s game of Life, that is. We ended up with a set of functions you can use to generate frames of a Life session.
This time I’ll show you an object-oriented version (a Life class) along with some other tweaks to make things look nicer.
03 Sunday May 2020
Posted in Fun
You may have heard that mathematician John Conway died last April. To his everlasting dismay, most people only know him for his “game” of Life (which he considered trivial and inferior to his real mathematical work). Unfortunately for Conway, his Life game is fascinating.
To honor his passing, I whipped up a Python version that I thought I’d share. Python is about the only language I’ve used a lot in which I’ve never implemented Life, so high time I did, right?
25 Saturday Apr 2020
Posted in CS101
Tags
Aspect-Oriented Programming, computer language, programming language, Python, Python code, Python decorator
Last time I began exploring Python decorators, which are a way of having one function “wrap” another function. Because the wrapper has access to both the input parameters and the return value, it can modify these values (unbeknownst to the inner function).
This time I pick up where I left off by exploring decorators modifying return values, decorators that take parameters, and decorators in classes.
24 Friday Apr 2020
I’ve been playing around with what Python calls decorators. They’re a built-in way of implementing Aspect-Oriented Programming techniques in Python. In fact, they’re quite powerful.
Since they aren’t a common language feature, they can be a little confusing at first, so I thought I’d try my hand at laying out how they work.
27 Sunday Oct 2019
Earlier this month, on my other blog, I wrote about the Playfair Cipher, a polygraphic substitution cipher invented by Sir Charles Wheatstone in 1854.
At the time I mused about writing some Python to automate using the cipher, and now I’ve done that, so here it is:
23 Sunday Jun 2019
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There’s a fairly simple puzzle, called The Eight Queens, that I’ve long favored as a project for first semester CS students. The problem is simple enough for a beginner to tackle, yet also interesting enough to be engaging. (And just tricky enough to be a nice beginner challenge.)
Due to a discussion on my other blog, I dug out an old Python implementation I had, and, after looking at it, I thought it might be worth writing a post about. If nothing else, as I said, the problem is interesting enough to be engaging.
22 Friday Mar 2019
Posted in Fun
This is a companion post to the Math Games #1 post on my main blog.
Here I present some code (Python, of course) for exploring the first two games, multiplicative persistence and the Collatz conjecture.
01 Tuesday Jan 2019
Posted in Fun
Tags
To ring in the new year I thought I’d play around with an old friend from my earliest programming days, a random text generator. Back then (over 30 years ago), but a little bit always, a good way to practice programming is by working on small, relatively easy, but still fun, programs.
Simple games are common choice, but not the only one. (I’ve probably written a version of Mastermind in every programming language I know.) Another fun choice is various image or text generators (or processors). Random text generators, in particular, offer a range of complexity depending on your taste and time.
