VI

VI. FIRST STEPS TOWARDS PROGRAMMING

Computers are wonderful for the simple reason that they do really boring things over and over and over again … and they never get bored! You can ask a computer to do a task a million times and it won’t even stick out its tongue at you. Here’s an example: Say you want to look up everyone in the phonebook named “Smith” and give them a call to sell them some spam. (You are a Spam-seller and you know that people named Smith are known to just love Spam.) This would be really boring and tiring if you had to do it by hand, but you could write a program to look through all the names and pick out the phone numbers of everyone named Smith.

In order to be able to do tasks like this, you first need to know how to write some basic programming statements. The basic statements that you will be using all the time in Python are: if statements, while loops and for loops.

>>> name1 = ‘Smith’

>>> if x < 0:

... x = 0

... print 'Negative changed to zero'

... elif x == 0:

... print 'Zero'

... elif x == 1:

... print 'Single'

... else:

... print 'More'

...

>>> # Measure some strings:

... a = ['cat', 'window', 'defenestrate']

>>> for x in a:

... print x, len(x)

...

cat 3

window 6

defenestrate 12

It is not safe to modify the sequence being iterated over in the loop (this can only happen for mutable sequence types, i.e., lists). If you need to modify the list you are iterating over, e.g., duplicate selected items, you must iterate over a copy. The slice notation makes this particularly convenient:

>>> for x in a[:]: # make a slice copy of the entire list

... if len(x) > 6: a.insert(0, x)

...

>>> a

['defenestrate', 'cat', 'window', 'defenestrate']

4.3 The range() Function

If you do need to iterate over a sequence of numbers, the built-in function range() comes in handy. It generates lists containing arithmetic progressions, e.g.:

>>> range(10)

[0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

The given end point is never part of the generated list; range(10) generates a list of 10 values, exactly the legal indices for items of a sequence of length 10. It is possible to let the range start at another number, or to specify a different increment (even negative; sometimes this is called the `step'):

>>> range(5, 10)

[5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

>>> range(0, 10, 3)

[0, 3, 6, 9]

>>> range(-10, -100, -30)

[-10, -40, -70]

To iterate over the indices of a sequence, combine range() and len() as follows:

>>> a = ['Mary', 'had', 'a', 'little', 'lamb']

>>> for i in range(len(a)):

... print i, a[i]

...

0 Mary

1 had

2 a

3 little

4 lamb

4.4 break and continue Statements, and else Clauses on Loops

The break statement, like in C, breaks out of the smallest enclosing for or while loop.

The continue statement, also borrowed from C, continues with the next iteration of the loop.

Loop statements may have an else clause; it is executed when the loop terminates through exhaustion of the list (with for) or when the condition becomes false (with while), but not when the loop is terminated by a break statement. This is exemplified by the following loop, which searches for prime numbers:

>>> for n in range(2, 10):

... for x in range(2, n):

... if n % x == 0:

... print n, 'equals', x, '*', n/x

... break

... else:

... print n, 'is a prime number'

...

2 is a prime number

3 is a prime number

4 equals 2 * 2

5 is a prime number

6 equals 2 * 3

7 is a prime number

8 equals 2 * 4

9 equals 3 * 3

4.5 pass Statements

The pass statement does nothing. It can be used when a statement is required syntactically but the program requires no action. For example:

>>> while 1:

... pass # Busy-wait for keyboard interrupt

...

>>> b = 1

>>> while b < 10:

... print b

... b = b + 1

...

>>>