I am trying to find a way to flip a date around in the natural programming language.
What I have is a #DOB which is equal to 19700830 yyyymmdd and I need it to be mmddyyyy. Is there an easy way to do this in Natural?
Question: How can I flip the date around to my specific format the easiest and most
efficient way in Natural?
Code:
RESET #NAME(A21/25)
#ROLE(A7/25)
#DOB(A10)
#I(P3)
#ADC(A1/25)
#SSN(A9)
I have tried using the FOR loop to get my results, but it is bulky and won't compile as of yet.. It is bulky at best.
FOR INDEX(P3) FROM 1 TO 8
IF INDEX >= 1 AND INDEX <= 4
#YYYY = #DOB(INDEX)
IF INDEX >= 5 AND INDEX <= 6
#MM = #DOB(INDEX)
IF INDEX >= 7 AND INDEX <= 7
#DD = #DOB(INDEX)
LOOP
This is what I would like to do but I am not completely certain that it will work. I think there is a better way but I do not have any real great books on the language and it is something that I do not do all that often. Once or twice a year so it is new to me.
The easiest way to do this is two redefine your variable and them just move and use the pieces of the redefine.
DEFINE #DOB(A10)
REDEFINE #DOB(#Y(A4) #M(A2) #D(A2))
Then you can just use the piece and move them around the way that you want.
WRITE WORK FILE 2 #M ',' #D ',' #Y
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Python has a built in function sum, which is effectively equivalent to:
def sum2(iterable, start=0):
return start + reduce(operator.add, iterable)
for all types of parameters except strings. It works for numbers and lists, for example:
sum([1,2,3], 0) = sum2([1,2,3],0) = 6 #Note: 0 is the default value for start, but I include it for clarity
sum({888:1}, 0) = sum2({888:1},0) = 888
Why were strings specially left out?
sum( ['foo','bar'], '') # TypeError: sum() can't sum strings [use ''.join(seq) instead]
sum2(['foo','bar'], '') = 'foobar'
I seem to remember discussions in the Python list for the reason, so an explanation or a link to a thread explaining it would be fine.
Edit: I am aware that the standard way is to do "".join. My question is why the option of using sum for strings was banned, and no banning was there for, say, lists.
Edit 2: Although I believe this is not needed given all the good answers I got, the question is: Why does sum work on an iterable containing numbers or an iterable containing lists but not an iterable containing strings?
Python tries to discourage you from "summing" strings. You're supposed to join them:
"".join(list_of_strings)
It's a lot faster, and uses much less memory.
A quick benchmark:
$ python -m timeit -s 'import operator; strings = ["a"]*10000' 'r = reduce(operator.add, strings)'
100 loops, best of 3: 8.46 msec per loop
$ python -m timeit -s 'import operator; strings = ["a"]*10000' 'r = "".join(strings)'
1000 loops, best of 3: 296 usec per loop
Edit (to answer OP's edit): As to why strings were apparently "singled out", I believe it's simply a matter of optimizing for a common case, as well as of enforcing best practice: you can join strings much faster with ''.join, so explicitly forbidding strings on sum will point this out to newbies.
BTW, this restriction has been in place "forever", i.e., since the sum was added as a built-in function (rev. 32347)
You can in fact use sum(..) to concatenate strings, if you use the appropriate starting object! Of course, if you go this far you have already understood enough to use "".join(..) anyway..
>>> class ZeroObject(object):
... def __add__(self, other):
... return other
...
>>> sum(["hi", "there"], ZeroObject())
'hithere'
Here's the source: http://svn.python.org/view/python/trunk/Python/bltinmodule.c?revision=81029&view=markup
In the builtin_sum function we have this bit of code:
/* reject string values for 'start' parameter */
if (PyObject_TypeCheck(result, &PyBaseString_Type)) {
PyErr_SetString(PyExc_TypeError,
"sum() can't sum strings [use ''.join(seq) instead]");
Py_DECREF(iter);
return NULL;
}
Py_INCREF(result);
}
So.. that's your answer.
It's explicitly checked in the code and rejected.
From the docs:
The preferred, fast way to concatenate a
sequence of strings is by calling
''.join(sequence).
By making sum refuse to operate on strings, Python has encouraged you to use the correct method.
Short answer: Efficiency.
Long answer: The sum function has to create an object for each partial sum.
Assume that the amount of time required to create an object is directly proportional to the size of its data. Let N denote the number of elements in the sequence to sum.
doubles are always the same size, which makes sum's running time O(1)×N = O(N).
int (formerly known as long) is arbitary-length. Let M denote the absolute value of the largest sequence element. Then sum's worst-case running time is lg(M) + lg(2M) + lg(3M) + ... + lg(NM) = N×lg(M) + lg(N!) = O(N log N).
For str (where M = the length of the longest string), the worst-case running time is M + 2M + 3M + ... + NM = M×(1 + 2 + ... + N) = O(N²).
Thus, summing strings would be much slower than summing numbers.
str.join does not allocate any intermediate objects. It preallocates a buffer large enough to hold the joined strings, and copies the string data. It runs in O(N) time, much faster than sum.
The Reason Why
#dan04 has an excellent explanation for the costs of using sum on large lists of strings.
The missing piece as to why str is not allowed for sum is that many, many people were trying to use sum for strings, and not many use sum for lists and tuples and other O(n**2) data structures. The trap is that sum works just fine for short lists of strings, but then gets put in production where the lists can be huge, and the performance slows to a crawl. This was such a common trap that the decision was made to ignore duck-typing in this instance, and not allow strings to be used with sum.
Edit: Moved the parts about immutability to history.
Basically, its a question of preallocation. When you use a statement such as
sum(["a", "b", "c", ..., ])
and expect it to work similar to a reduce statement, the code generated looks something like
v1 = "" + "a" # must allocate v1 and set its size to len("") + len("a")
v2 = v1 + "b" # must allocate v2 and set its size to len("a") + len("b")
...
res = v10000 + "$" # must allocate res and set its size to len(v9999) + len("$")
In each of these steps a new string is created, which for one might give some copying overhead as the strings are getting longer and longer. But that’s maybe not the point here. What’s more important, is that every new string on each line must be allocated to it’s specific size (which. I don’t know it it must allocate in every iteration of the reduce statement, there might be some obvious heuristics to use and Python might allocate a bit more here and there for reuse – but at several points the new string will be large enough that this won’t help anymore and Python must allocate again, which is rather expensive.
A dedicated method like join, however has the job to figure out the real size of the string before it starts and would therefore in theory only allocate once, at the beginning and then just fill that new string, which is much cheaper than the other solution.
I dont know why, but this works!
import operator
def sum_of_strings(list_of_strings):
return reduce(operator.add, list_of_strings)
I started coding in Python 4 days ago, so I'm a complete newbie. I have a dataset that comprises an undefined number of dictionaries. Each dictionary is the x and y of a point in the coordinates.
I'm trying to compute the summatory of xy by nesting the loop that multiplies xy within the loop that sums the products.
However I haven't been able to figure out how to multiply the values for the two keys in each dictionary (so far I only got to multiply all the x*y)
So far I've got this:
If my data set were to be d= [{'x':0, 'y':0}, {'x':1, 'y':1}, {'x':2, 'y':3}]
I've got the code for the function that calculates the product of each pair of x and y:
def product_xy (product_x_per_y):
prod_xy =[]
n = 0
for i in range (len(d)):
result = d[n]['x']*d[n]['y']
prod_xy.append(result)
n+1
return prod_xy
I also have the function to add up the elements of a list (like prod_xy):
def total_xy_prod (sum_prod):
all = 0
for s in sum_prod:
all+= s
return all
I've been trying to find a way to nest this two functions so that I can iterate through the multiplication of each x*y and then add up all the products.
Make sure your code works as expected
First, your functions have a few mistakes. For example, in product_xy, you assign n=0, and later do n + 1; you probably meant to do n += 1 instead of n + 1. But n is also completely unnecessary; you can simply use the i from the range iteration to replace n like so: result = d[i]['x']*d[i]['y']
Nesting these two functions: part 1
To answer your question, it's fairly straightforward to get the sum of the products of the elements from your current code:
coord_sum = total_xy_prod(product_xy(d))
Nesting these two functions: part 2
However, there is a much shorter and more efficient way to tackle this problem. For one, Python provides the built-in function sum() to sum the elements of a list (and other iterables), so there's no need create total_xy_prod. Our code could at this point read as follows:
coord_sum = sum(product_xy(d))
But product_xy is also unnecessarily long and inefficient, and we could also replace it entirely with a shorter expression. In this case, the shortening comes from generator expressions, which are basically compact for-loops. The Python docs give some of the basic details of how the syntax works at list comprehensions, which are distinct, but closely related to generator expressions. For the purposes of answering this question, I will simply present the final, most simplified form of your desired result:
coord_sum = sum(e['x'] * e['y'] for e in d)
Here, the generator expression iterates through every element in d (using for e in d), multiplies the numbers stored in the dictionary keys 'x' and 'y' of each element (using e['x'] * e['y']), and then sums each of those products from the entire sequence.
There is also some documentation on generator expressions, but it's a bit technical, so it's probably not approachable for the Python beginner.
Let's assume that I want to create 10 variables which would look like this:
x1 = 1;
x2 = 2;
x3 = 3;
x4 = 4;
.
.
xi = i;
This is a simplified version of what I'm intending to do. Basically I just want so save code lines by creating these variables in an automated way. Is there the possibility to construct a variable name in Matlab? The pattern in my example would be ["x", num2str(i)]. But I cant find a way to create a variable with that name.
You can do it with eval but you really should not
eval(['x', num2str(i), ' = ', num2str(i)]); %//Not recommended
Rather use a cell array:
x{i} = i
I also strongly advise using a cell array or a struct for such cases. I think it will even give you some performance boost.
If you really need to do so Dan told how to. But I would also like to point to the genvarname function. It will make sure your string is a valid variable name.
EDIT: genvarname is part of core matlab and not of the statistics toolbox
for k=1:10
assignin('base', ['x' num2str(k)], k)
end
Although it is long overdue, i justed wanted to add another answer.
the function genvarname is exactly for these cases
and if you use it with a tmp structure array you do not need the eval cmd
the example 4 from this link is how to do it http://www.mathworks.co.uk/help/matlab/ref/genvarname.html
for k = 1:5
t = clock;
pause(uint8(rand * 10));
v = genvarname('time_elapsed', who);
eval([v ' = etime(clock,t)'])
end
all the best
eyal
If anyone else is interested, the correct syntax from Dan's answer would be:
eval(['x', num2str(i), ' = ', num2str(i)]);
My question already contained the wrong syntax, so it's my fault.
I needed something like this since you cannot reference structs (or cell arrays I presume) from workspace in Simulink blocks if you want to be able to change them during the simulation.
Anyway, for me this worked best
assignin('base',['string' 'parts'],values);
I have this peice of code:
n = int (input ('Enter the Number of Players: '))
m = [[j] for j in range (0, n)]
all_names= []
i = 0
while n > 1:
m[i] = input('Player {0}: '.format (i+1))
all_names.extend ([m[i]])
if m[i][0] != m[i-1][-1]:
b= m.pop (i)
n = n-1
if all_names.count (m[i]) == 2:
n = n-1
b= m.pop (i)
i = i+1
It says the index is out of range (second if clause)
but I dont get it, why?
I hate to not answer your question directly, but what you're trying to do seems... really confusing. Python has a sort of rule that there's supposed to be a really clear, clean way of doing things, so if a piece of code looks really funky (especially for such a simple function), it's probably not using the right approach.
If you just want to create a container of names, there are numerous simpler ways of doing it:
players=int(input("How many players?\n"))
player_names=set()
while len(player_names)<players:
player_names.add(input("What is player {}'s name?\n".format(len(player_names)+1)))
... will give you a set of unique player names, although this won't be ordered. That might matter (your implementation kept order, so maybe it is), and in this case you could still use a list and add a small check to make sure you were adding a new name and not repeatedly adding names:
players=int(input("How many players?\n"))
player_names=list()
while len(player_names)<players:
playname=input("What is player {}'s name?\n".format(len(player_names)+1))
if playname not in player_names:
player_names.append(playname)
I'm open to someone haranguing me about dodging the question, particularly if there's a purpose/reason for the approach the questioner took.
Length of m decreases every time the code enters the first if clause. However, you increment the value of i in each iteration. So, at the midpoint of length of m (if the 1st clause is entered always) or a little later, the value of i will be bigger than the value of m and you will get an index out of range.
I have a tiny DSL that actually works quite well. When I say
import language.CWMWL
main = runCWMWL $ do
out (matrixMult, A, 1, row, 1 3 44 6 7)
then runCWMWL is a function that is exported by language.CWMWL. This parses the experession and takes some action.
What I want to achieve is that there is some way to repeat this e.g. 1000 times and have the third element of the tuple consisting the numbers 1 to 1000. My own DSL is not complete enough to do this. Eventually I want to change the string in the last element as well.
Is there any possibility to do this without Quasi Quotes? Are Quasi Quotes the best tool for this?
What binops / primitives would my DSL need to contain or need to wrap in order to allow this in an elegant way?
Unless I'm misunderstanding, I don't think quasiquotation will get you something much nicer than
main = runCWMWL $
sequence [ out (matrixMult, A, n, row, 1 3 44 6 7) | n <- [1..1000] ]
You might also look into MonadComprehensions as well as RebindableSyntax for other ideas.