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Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!

Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.

Posts by Karl Knechtel‭

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Meta How should I organize material about text encoding in Python into questions?

Here is my current thinking on the matter. Regarding questions/facets that are "two sides of the same coin" - encoding vs decoding the data, reading vs. writing files - I think they should be ...

posted 1y ago by Karl Knechtel‭

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Q&A How does the strict aliasing rule enable or prevent compiler optimizations?

Aliasing is perhaps better understood as a property of assignments through pointers, not of the pointers themselves. First, let's consider the reasoning behind applying the optimization to the fir...

posted 3mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭

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Q&A Common string handling pitfalls in C programming

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...

posted 3mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  edited 3mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭

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Q&A Generating combinations of elements, which are themselves sequences of the same length, where the elements have no value in common at any position

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 ...

posted 3mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭

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Q&A Generating combinations of elements, which are themselves sequences of the same length, where the elements have no value in common at any position

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...

posted 3mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  edited 3mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭

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Q&A Why can't I run freshly-installed Python from the command line on Windows?

Why the installed Python isn't found By default, Windows installers for Python install Python in a folder that is not listed in the PATH environment variable. This means that executables in that f...

posted 8mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭

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Q&A Why does `venv` seem to be missing or broken? Isn't it part of the standard library?

I understand the benefits of virtual environments in general, and specifically I want to use a virtual environment so that I'll have access to Pip without exposing the system Python (i.e., included...

1 answer  ·  posted 8mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  last activity 8mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭

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Q&A Why can't I use a library I just installed with Pip?

Problems like this occur, fundamentally, because there is more than one Python installation on the system, and the system is configured in a way that pip installs for a different Python than the on...

posted 8mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  edited 8mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭

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Q&A Installing packages for, and using them with, a specific Python installation

Choosing an environment for third-party libraries The short version of the answer is: Python installations don't normally share libraries because there are too many ways it could go wrong; general...

posted 9mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  edited 8mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭

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Q&A Installing packages for, and using them with, a specific Python installation

I have multiple installations of Python on my machine. I already know how to choose one to use to run for my code - and therefore, I could also solve the problem for third-party application code. ...

1 answer  ·  posted 9mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  last activity 8mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭

Question python pip
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Q&A Why does `distutils` seem to be missing or broken? Isn't it part of the standard library?

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...

1 answer  ·  posted 10mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  last activity 10mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭

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Code Reviews JSON log formatter

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...

posted 1y ago by Karl Knechtel‭

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Q&A Optimized representation for sets?

First store the universe of potential elements as a sequence, then encode each set as an unsigned integer interpreted as follows: if the 1s bit in binary is set (1), the set contains the 0th elemen...

posted 1y ago by Karl Knechtel‭

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Q&A Optimized representation for sets?

I need to do a lot of calculations involving sets. There are relatively few values in the "universe" of candidates that could appear in any of the sets, but potentially very many such sets (they mi...

1 answer  ·  posted 1y ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  last activity 1y ago by Karl Knechtel‭

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Q&A How can I make a standalone executable from Python code?

I know that I can make Python code run starting from the script, but this still requires the user to have Python installed (and will still rely on configuring the system so that it can find Python ...

1 answer  ·  posted 8mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  last activity 8mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭

Question python build
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Q&A How can I make a standalone executable from Python code?

Normally, Python is compiled, but it compiles to bytecode, not to your computer's native instructions. This bytecode is cross-platform, but it can't be used by the CPU directly - it can't be turned...

posted 8mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  edited 8mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭

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Q&A Reinstall old Python libraries after update

Every time I run a program I'm used to, I get a bunch of import errors, and have to reinstall the dependencies. As you're presumably aware, the fundamental problem is that each Python installa...

posted 8mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  edited 8mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭

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Q&A Why won't Matplotlib show me a plot?

I installed Matplotlib and tried a simple demo, but I got a warning message and no plot showed up: >>> import matplotlib.pyplot as plt >>> plt.plot([1,2,3],[4,5,6]) [<matplo...

1 answer  ·  posted 8mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  last activity 8mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭

Question python matplotlib
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Q&A Why won't Matplotlib show me a plot?

Matplotlib uses a backend to render the plot. Some backends are "GUI backends", meaning that they can render into a window that displays on your screen. Others are "non-GUI backends" which can only...

posted 8mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭

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Q&A Why can't I run freshly-installed Python from the command line on Windows?

I tried installing Python on an old computer running Windows 8[1]. I know for a fact that there was never any previous installation of Python on the machine. The installation appeared to be success...

1 answer  ·  posted 8mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  last activity 8mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭

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Q&A How to compress columns of dataframe by function

Conceptually, applying a function along an axis of a DataFrame (i.e., applying it to each row or column) inherently produces a Series: a two-dimensional result is collapsed to a one-dimensional res...

posted 1y ago by Karl Knechtel‭

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