I'm writing such a method library. I can't seem to find a good name for it nor any reference of anyone having named such a function before.
What would be a good name for it?
I would call it a clipper as a noun and clip as a verb.
The operation you're describing would be a NegativeClip or SubzeroClip. Of course you could just have a generic function with two or three arguments. Depending on your needs I could see LowerBoundClip or FloorClip or BottomClip being paired with UpperBoundClip or CeilingClip or TopClip instead. In a couple of those the word clip almost sounds redundant.
Words like bound, bounds, bounded, boundary are used in mathematics but as I think about possible function names I'm not sure they were as clear in meaning. And binding is already used in other programming topics so there's some potential for confusion that also.
Related
Suppose we're given some sort of graph where the feasible region of our optimization problem is given. For example: here is an image
How would I go on about constructing these constraints in an integer optimization problem? Anyone got any tips? Thanks!
Mate, I agree with the others that you should be a little more specific than that paint-ish picture ;). In particular you are neither specifying any objective/objective direction nor are you giving any context, what about this graph should be integer-variable related, except for the existence of disjunctive feasible sets, which may be modeled by MIP-techniques. It seems like your problem is formalization of what you conceptualized. However, in case you are just being lazy and are just interested in modelling disjunctive regions, you should be looking into disjunctive programming techniques, such as "big-M" (Note: big-M reformulations can be problematic). You should be aiming at some convex-hull reformulation if you can attain one (fairly easily).
Back to your picture, it is quite clear that you have a problem in two real dimensions (let's say in R^2), where the constraints bounding the feasible set are linear (the lines making up the feasible polygons).
So you know that you have two dimensions and need two real continuous variables, say x[1] and x[2], to formulate each of your linear constraints (a[i,1]*x[1]+a[i,2]<=rhs[i] for some index i corresponding to the number of lines in your graph). Additionally your variables seem to be constrained to the first orthant so x[1]>=0 and x[2]>=0 should hold. Now, to add disjunctions you want some constraints that only hold when a certain condition is true. Therefore, you can add two binary decision variables, say y[1],y[2] and an additional constraint y[1]+y[2]=1, to tell that only one set of constraints can be active at the same time. You should be able to implement this with the help of big-M by reformulating the constraints as follows:
If you bound things from above with your line:
a[i,1]*x[1]+a[i,2]-rhs[i]<=M*(1-y[1]) if i corresponds to the one polygon,
a[i,1]*x[1]+a[i,2]-rhs[i]<=M*(1-y[2]) if i corresponds to the other polygon,
and if your line bounds things from below:
-M*(1-y[1])<=-a[i,1]*x[1]-a[i,2]+rhs[i] if i corresponds to the one polygon,
-M*(1-y[1])<=-a[i,1]*x[1]-a[i,2]+rhs[i] if i corresponds to the other polygon.
It is important that M is sufficiently large, but not too large to cause numerical issues.
That being said, I am by no means an expert on these disjunctive programming techniques, so feel free to chime in, add corrections or make things clearer.
Also, a more elaborate question typically yields more elaborate and satisfying answers ;) If you had gone to the effort of making up a true small example problem you likely would have gotten a full formulation of your problem or even an executable piece of code in no time.
I have a tuple list that look like this:
{[{<<"id">>,1},
{<<"alerts_count">>,0},
{<<"username">>,<<"santiagopoli">>},
{<<"facebook_name">>,<<"Santiago Ignacio Poli">>},
{<<"lives">>,{[{<<"quantity">>,8},
{<<"max">>,8},
{<<"unlimited">>,true}]}}]}
I want to know how to extract properties from that tuple. For example:
get_value("id",TupleList), %% should return 1.
get_value("facebook_name",TupleList), %% should return "Santiago Ignacio Poli".
get_value("lives"), %% should return another TupleList, so i can call
get_value("quantity",get_value("lives",TupleList)).
I tried to match all the "properties" to a record called "User" but I don't know how to do it.
To be more specific: I used the Jiffy library (github.com/davisp/jiffy) to parse a JSON. Now i want to obtain a value from that JSON.
Thanks!
The first strange thing is that the tuple contains a single item list: where [{Key, Value}] is embedded in {} for no reason. So let's reference all that stuff you wrote as a variable called Stuff, and pull it out:
{KVList} = Stuff
Good start. Now we are dealing with a {Key, Value} type list. With that done, we can now do:
lists:keyfind(<<"id">>, 1, KVList)
or alternately:
proplists:get_value(<<"id">>, KVList)
...and we would get the first answer you asked about. (Note the difference in what the two might return if the Key isn't in the KVList before you copypasta some code from here...).
A further examination of this particular style of question gets into two distinctly different areas:
Erlang docs regarding data functions that have {Key, Value} functions (hint: the lists, proplists, orddict, and any other modules based on the same concept is a good candidate for research, all in the standard library), including basic filter and map.
The underlying concept of data structures as semantically meaningful constructs. Honestly, I don't see a lot of deliberate thought given to this in the functional programming world outside advanced type systems (like in Haskell, or what Dialyzer tries hard to give you). The best place to learn about this is relational database concepts -- once you know what "5NF" really means, then come back to the real world and you'll have a different, more insightful perspective, and problems like this won't just be trivial, they will beg for better foundations.
You should look into proplists module and their proplist:get_value/2 function.
You just need to think how it should behave when Key is not present in the list (or is the default proplists behavior satisfying).
And two notes:
since you keys are binnary, you should use <<"id">> in your function
proplists works on lists, but data you presented is list inside one element tuple. So you need to extract this you Data.
{PropList} = Data,
Id = proplists:get_value(<<"id">>, PropList),
I am receiving as input a "map" represented by strings, where certain nodes of the map have significance (s). For example:
---s--
--s---
s---s-
s---s-
-----s
My question is, what reasonable options are there for representing this input as an object.
The only option that really comes to mind is:
(1) Each position translated to node with up,down,left,right pointers. The whole object contains a pointer to top right node.
This seems like just a graph representation specific to this problem.
Thanks for the help.
Additionally, if there are common terms for this type of input, please let me know
Well, it depends a lot on what you need to delegate to those objects. OOP is basically about asking objects to perform things in order to solve a given problem, so it is hard to tell without knowing what you need to accomplish.
The solution you mention can be a valid one, as can also be having a matrix (in this case of 6x5) where you store in each matrix cell an object representing the node (just as an example, I used both approaches once to model the Conway's game of life). If you could give some more information on what you need to do with the object representation of your map then a better design can be discussed.
HTH
Is there a list of items on the web that you should not use when creating a model or variable?
For example, if I wanted to create apartment listings, naming a model something like Property would be problematic in the future and also confusing since property is a built-in Python function.
I did try Googling this, but couldn't come up with anything.
Thanks!
Rules and constraints about naming depend on the programming language. How an identifier/name is bound depends on the language semantics and its scoping rules: an identifer/name will be bound to different element depending on the scope. Scoping is usally lexical (i.e. static) but some language have dynamic scoping (some variant of lisp).
If names are different, there is no confusion in scoping. If identifiers/names are reused accrossed scopes, an identifier/name might mask another one. This is referred as Shadowing. This is a source of confusion.
Certain reserved names (i.e. keywords) have special meaning. Such keyword can simply be forbidden as names of other elements, or not.
For instance, in Smallatalk self is a keyword. It is still possible to declare a temporary variable self, though. In the scope where the temporary variable is visible, self resolves to the temporary variable, not the usual self that is receiver of the message.
Of course, shadowing can happen between regular names.
Scoping rules take types into consideration as well, and inheritance might introduce shadows.
Another source of confusion related to binding is Method Overloading. In statically typed languages, which method is executed depends on the static types at the call site. In certain cases, overloading makes it confusing to know which method is selected. Both Shadowing and Overloading should avoided to avoid confusions.
If your goal is to translate Python to Javascript, and vice versa, I guess you need to check the scoping rules and keywords of both languages to make sure your translation is not only syntactically correct, but also semantically correct.
Generally, programming languages have 'reserved words' or 'keywords' that you're either not able to use or in some cases are but should stay away from. For Python, you can find that list here.
Most words in most natural languages can have different meanings, according to the context. That's why we use specifiers to make the meaning of a word clear. If in any case you think that some particular identifier may be confusing, you can just add a specifier to make it clear. For example ObjectProperty has probably nothing to do with real estate, even in an application that deals with real estate.
The case you present is no different than using generic identifiers with no attached context. For example a variable named limit or length may have completely different meanings in different programs. Just use identifiers that make sense and document their meaning extensively. Being consistent within your own code base would also be preferable. Do not complicate your life with banned term lists that will never be complete and will only make programming more difficult.
The obvious exceptions are words reserved by your programming language of choice - but then again no decent compiler would allow you to use them anyway...
Sorry for this english related question but I only came across that expression in the context of IT. What does abstracting over something mean ? For example abstracting over objects or abstracting over classes.
Thanks
In this context, the word "abstract" comes from the lambda calculus, where it means "to make something a parameter" (a value parameter or a type parameter). The word is used more generally with other kinds of parameters; for example, mechanisms for "generic programming" often include ways of abstracting over classes.
Probably the easiest language in which to abstract over objects and classes is Smalltalk, where everything (including every class) is an object. Smalltalk, like Ruby which is closely based on Smalltalk, has "duck typing", so for example you could "abstract over" any collection class by writing Smalltalk code that uses only methods common to all collection classes. You could abstract over collection objects in a similar way.
It means to pull it out for a function as an argument. It makes more sense in functional programming but imagine you have a function that takes an integer and adds five to it you could make that a variable and have a sum function that would work on any two integers.
That case is not so interesting. Now what if you pulled the addition operation up and made it an argument. Now you have a function that takes two arguments and applies calls the third as a function on them. Here you have abstracted the operation out of the function.
Sorry this is such a weak explanation, I will fix it later when I get a chance. It makes sence with a couple of nice examples, I just have to run ATM.