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Posts by Karl Knechtel
Several times now, I've seen advice in tutorials, setup/install instructions for Python-based projects, etc. to use a virtual environment to keep things organized and make it simpler to manage the ...
Inspired by https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/432242, and the relevant main-space questions. I have heard that C and C++ something called the "strict aliasing rule", which means for exa...
Using and and or correctly The left-hand side and right-hand side of these operators should both be valid operands, which should each come from a comparison. Thus, we should repeat the comparison ...
While trying to understand logical 'or'/'and', I encountered another problem (I'm writing Python code here, but my question is about the logic, not about any given programming language). I have som...
In Python 3.12, I noticed that some libraries seem to be missing or "deprecated": >>> import asynchat Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>...
Whenever Python loads code from a .py file, that code gets its own namespace for global variables - so they're not truly global, but per-file values. (When you look at an imported module "from outs...
I've seen many examples of Python scripts that include a line that says: if __name__ == '__main__': Sometimes the following block contains a bunch of code, but other times it just makes a singl...
First, we need to define some semantics. While it may not matter for your actual inputs, I propose that it should be valid for the output elements - the parts of the text found outside of brackets ...
Suppose I have some variables like: >>> count = 8 >>> status = 'off' I want to combine them with some hard-coded text, to get a single string like 'I have 8 cans of Spam®; b...
Mac/Linux In this environment, Python scripts can be given a shebang line that tells the operating system that the file is a script, and what interpreter (i.e., Python) to use for it. Because # st...
Python allows for operators to be overloaded (the subject of a separate future Q&A). The / operator doesn't strictly mean division in a mathematical sense; it means whatever the operands define...
Understanding distutils and setuptools: the history The short version of "why does installing Setuptools fix the problem?" is that Setuptools provides its own distutils package, overriding anythin...
This question is inspired by If I have a char array containing strings with a null byte (\0) terminating each string, how would I add another string onto the end? on Stack Overflow. Suppose I have...
The raise statement in Python accepts either an Exception class or an instance of that class. When used with a class, Python will create and raise an instance by passing no arguments to the constru...
Command-line timing Rather than using separate code for timing, I tried running the timeit module as a command-line tool. I wrote initial versions of the implementations based on the OP and hkotsu...
Sometimes code needs to assign (or otherwise use) a value that depends on some condition. The naive approach is to use explicit branching, which in Python would look like: if some_condition(): ...
Are books special? When I see a question like this, I naturally transform it into a more general question about resources. Printed books aren't necessarily the best way to learn about programming ...
I struggle to think of any use cases for merging from. Why was the merge command designed this way? The model here is that many developers on the same project are using branches to develop fea...
Sometimes when I try to install a third-party library for Python, I get an error saying that either distutils, or some part of it like distutils.core or distutils.util, could not be found. It's sho...
PEP 8 Four-space indentation is the community standard. There are many strategies for wrapping long lines; I have found that it's often best to just use temporary variables to avoid wrapping lines...
This question is adapted from a question I just helped fix up on Stack Overflow. I'm giving a different motivating example which I think will make it clearer what the requirements are and why a n...
Using a recursive generator There isn't anything like a built-in solution for this algorithm, but it's easy to express the desired output recursively. A valid output combination of k-many inputs l...
Using filtered products of candidates, over combinations of first letters Let's consider the n=2 case first. (For higher n, we can use the same sort of recursive generator approach as in my other ...
Understanding the representation of text in C "Text" is a high level abstraction that C doesn't properly support Fundamentally, C does not have any built-in "string" type. It arguably doesn't eve...
I want to make multiple comparisons at once, of the same type, in a Python program. For example, to check whether all of a certain group of strings are in a longer test string; or whether a specifi...
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