24 Friday Apr 2020
Posted in Python
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.
22 Wednesday Apr 2020
Posted in CS101
Tags
computer code, computer programming, function currying, Python code, software design, software development
I saw a video recently about function currying, and it triggered the realization that currying might solve a problem I’ve been pondering in the context of language parsing. The problem involves knowing how many arguments an operator expects, what’s called the arity of an operation or function. It can vary from zero to many.
It occurred to me that, with currying, there could be a language where operations always take just one argument. That would solve a challenge for a mathematical expression language I have in mind.
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
Tags
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.
14 Tuesday May 2019
Posted in CS101
I’m returning to the full-adder logic circuit modeling to present the code for a version that tries to capture the timing of the signals.
The goal is to take a closer look at the intermediate states of the adder as signals trickle through it.
10 Friday May 2019
Posted in Fun
Lately I’ve been exploring the idea of a vector space with a large number of dimensions (but few degrees of freedom). A model was presented with five degrees of freedom in 500 dimensions (neurons, as it happens).
The question is, given the axes are bit-level, does normal vector manipulation semantics make sense. My contention is it has severe problems.
08 Wednesday May 2019
Posted in CS101
This is the third post in the Full Adder series. The first post explored ways to code the abstract model of a full-adder. The second post explored one way to code a simulation of a physical system (where the models are of the components of the system).
This post explores another gate-based model, but one with only one type of gate. This simulation is close to being transistor-level.
07 Tuesday May 2019
Posted in CS101
In the last post, I explored different ways to model the logic of a full-adder. In this post I’ll explore a model of a physical instance of a full-adder — a model that simulates physical reality.
Because a full-adder is, at root, a mathematical expression, various software models can accomplish the same results. Models are abstractions, so the only thing a model can simulate perfectly is another model.
05 Sunday May 2019
Posted in CS101
Tags
finite state machine, FSA, FSM, full adder, half adder, Python code, state engine, state table, truth table
I was involved in a debate recently about whether a full adder logic circuit is a computer. The computer science answer is: “No, not as we define a computer.”
I plan to address that answer in detail on my main blog. Here I wanted to show some of the different ways a full adder can be modeled and implemented.
22 Friday Mar 2019
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.
The Hard-Core Coder 