Tag Archives: Python code

The Eight Queens

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.

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So Random!

01 Tuesday Jan 2019

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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.

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Knowing Where To Bang

02 Wednesday Aug 2017

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Sometimes ya gotta laugh. I just spent nearly an hour chasing one of those bugs that “can’t be happening” because “the code looks absolutely correct (as far as I can tell).” Of course, the bug, once you find it, was always hiding in plain view.

This time the fix involved adding just two characters, incidentally improving the program semantics, and very much reminded me of the old joke about the huge cargo ship that breaks down at sea…

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State Engines, part 3

25 Wednesday Nov 2015

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In the first two parts of this series I’ve introduced state engines and taken apart a specific instance of an engine. Now it’s time to tie together the design idea with approaches to building a variety of such engines.

Because the programming logic is in the state table, the engine can be fairly generic. That means it’s possible to create a state engine framework you can reuse for a variety of applications.

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State Engines, part 2

11 Wednesday Nov 2015

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Last time I introduced state engines and state tables. I showed parts of a simple implementation of one in Python. It parsed the language introduced in Little Programming Languages. This post continues that, so be sure you’ve read that first article.

I got as far as the state table implementing the process, and that’s where this post picks up. I’ll also get into the SourceReader class that does the heavy lifting.

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Python & Baseball

19 Monday May 2014

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One of the cool things about being a carpenter is that you can make your own shelves and dog houses. One of the cool things about being a computer programmer is that you can make your own computer apps!

In an era when computers are so much a part of life, that’s a useful skill. And the nice thing about doing it yourself is that things turn out exactly as you want them. You can make things that are perfect just for you.

Case in point: using Python to create custom charts of baseball stats!

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