Intro

Today I want to talk about the unpacking operators(* and **) in python.

Basic usage

We use * for numeric data types to indicate we want to do multiplication. However, we can also apply * to iterable objects¹, which means we want to unpack all the elements inside them.

📒The built-in iterable objects: list, tuple, set, and dict

Starred assignment/expression

In the release of python 3.0, it is shipped with powerful iterable unpacking operations², which is called the starred assignment/expression(or parallel assignment).

Intro

Today, I would like to share a neat introduced in Python3.8 - the walrus operator. It sparked quite a bit of discussion before ultimately being accepted. 🤔️

The power of the walrus operator lies in turning an assignment statement into an assignment expression. You may be wondering: what exactly is the difference between a statement and an expression?

Expression vs Statement

In programming languages, you may encounter many different constructs. Broadly, they can be divided into two categories - expressions and statements. An expression is evaluated and produces a value, whereas a statement performs an action and does not return anything.

Intro

Today I want to talk about the new feature bring in Python 3.10 – Pattern matching 🎉

Those who have learned C language must be familiar with the following switch statement:

switch (expression)
{
    case constant_1:
      // statements
      break;

    case constant_2:
      // statements
      break;
      
    // Fall through
    // the value of the expression can be either constant_3 or constant_4 :)
    case constant_3:
    case constant_4:
      
      // statements
    
    
    default:
      // default statements
}

To recap, the syntax rules of the switch statement:

Intro

If you’ve been using dynamic languages like Python, JavaScript, etc., you probably won’t notice the difference between stack and heap. Because these languages have garbage collectors (GCs) that will automatically manage memory for you, you just need to program at a high level without considering the details. The bad news is that GC is not a cost-free design. No matter how well-designed a GC algorithm is, the performance of the code will be degraded to some extent. If you have been in programming for a long time, you may have heard something like “the recursion explodes the stack”. You may or may not click on the search engine to understand the difference between stack and heap. Chances are you just clicked into this article :)

Intro

In the process of learning Vim, the most enlightening sentence for me is :

What are the semantic actions

When the parser processes the input code, it not only determines whether the syntax is correct but also performs some useful actions. These actions are called semantic actions. In fact, it is a piece of code, which is generally embedded in the rules of the grammar file. Then when the parser applies this specific rule, the code you set will be executed. From another perspective, semantic actions are actually “triggers”, and the trigger condition is that the parser applies the corresponding rules.

Intro

Today I coded the Leetcode 169. Majority Element again. I vaguely remember what the optimal solution is called Boyer-Moore Majority Voting Algorithm. However, I have no idea what is except for its name. So I plan to systematically learn the principle of this algorithm and summarize it to write this blog. I once heard that:

If you want to master something, teach it :)

So, I’m here today to share this algorithm with you, and try to teach you this method in plain language, so let’s get started :)

Intro

I have finished the first two projects - Hog and Cats. The first two projects are relatively simple and uncomplicated. But today, the difficulty of the third project has indeed increased (you can see how complicated this is by looking at the rules of the game). It feels like Plants vs. Zombies

So I’m going to write a blog to sort out the ideas when writing code. 🤗

Phase 1: Basic gameplay

Problem 1 (1 pt)

Part A: Currently, there is no cost for placing any type of Ant, and so there is no challenge to the game. The base class Ant has a food_cost of zero. Override this class attribute for HarvesterAnt and ThrowerAnt according to the “Food Cost” column in the table below.

Trees

Q1: Prune Min

Write a function that prunes a Tree t mutatively. t and its branches always have zero or two branches. For the trees with two branches, reduce the number of branches from two to one by keeping the branch that has the smaller label value. Do nothing with trees with zero branches.

Prune the tree in a direction of your choosing (top down or bottom up). The result should be a linear tree.

BNF

Q1: Grouping and Pipes

In this question, you will add support for grouping and piping.

Recall that grouping allows for an entire regular expression to be treated as a single unit, and piping allows for a pattern to match an expression on either side. Combined, these will let us create patterns which match multiple strings!

Define the group and pipe expressions in your grammar.

1. A group consists of any regex expression surrounded by parentheses (()).
2. A pipe operator consists of a regex expression, followed by a pipe (|) character, and lastly followed by another regex expression.

For example, r"apples" would match exactly the phrase “apples” in an input. If we wanted our pattern from before to match “oranges” as well, we could expand our rstring to do so using groupings and pipes: r"(apples)|(oranges)".

Regular Expressions

Q1: Calculator Ops

Write a regular expression that parses strings written in the 61A Calculator language and returns any expressions which have two numeric operands, leaving out the parentheses around them.

We need to write a regular expression to match a pattern - (operand operator1 operator2). The operands consist of +, -, *, /. We can use [] here. Don’t forget to put a \ in front of - to escape it.