Functions, and Variables

Creating Code with Python
 VS Code is a special type of text editor that is called a compiler. At the top,
you’ll notice a text editor and, at the bottom you will see a terminal where you
can execute commands.
 In the terminal, you can execute code hello.py to start coding.
 In the text editor above, you can type print("hello, world"). This is a famous
canonical program that nearly all coders write during their learning process.
 In the terminal window, you can execute commands. To run this program, you
are going to need to move your cursor to the bottom of the screen, clicking in
the terminal window. You can now type a second command in the terminal
window. Next to the dollar sign, type python hello.py and press the enter key on
your keyboard.
 Recall, computers really only understand zeros and ones. Therefore, when you
run python hello.py, python will interpret the text that you created in hello.py and
translate it into the zeros and ones that the computer can understand.
 The result of running the python hello.py program is hello, world.
 Congrats! You just created your first program.
Functions
 Functions are verbs or actions that the computer or computer language will
already know how to perform.
 In your hello.py program, the print function knows how to print to the terminal
window.
 The print function takes arguments. In this case, "hello, world" are the arguments
that the print function takes.
Bugs
 Bugs are a natural part of coding. These are mistakes, problems for you to
solve! Don’t get discouraged! This is part of the process of becoming a great
programmer.
 Imagine in our hello.py program that accidentally typed print("hello, world" notice
that we missed the final ) required by the compiler. If I purposefully make this
mistake, you’ll the compiler will output an error in the terminal window!
 Often, the error messages will inform you of your mistake and provide you
clues on how to fix them. However, there will be many times that the compiler
is not this kind.
Improving Your First Python Program

 We can personalize your first Python program.
 In our text editor in hello.py we can add another function. input is a function that
takes a prompt as an argument. We can edit our code to say
 input("What's your name? ")
 print("hello, world")
 This edit alone, however, will not allow your program to output what your user
inputs. For that, we will need to introduce you to variables
Variables
 A variable is just a container for a value within your own program.

 In your program, you can introduce your own variable in your program by
editing it to read
 name = input("What's your name? ")
 print("hello, world")
Notice that this equal = sign in the middle of name = input("What's your name?
") has a special role in programming. This equal sign literally assigns what is on
the right to what is on the left. Therefore, the value returned by input("What's
your name? ") is assigned to name.
 If you edit your code as follows, you will notice an error

 print("hello, name")
 The program will return hello, name in the terminal window regardless of what
the user types.
 Further editing our code, you could type
 print("hello,")
 print(name)
 The result in the terminal window would be
 What's your name? David
 hello
 David
 We are getting closer to the result we might intend!
 You can learn more in Python’s documentation on data types.
Comments
 Comments are a way for programmers to track what they are doing in their
programs and even inform others about their intentions for a block of code. In
short, they are notes for yourself and others that will see your code!
 You can add comments to your program to be able to see what it is that your
program is doing. You might edit your code as follows:
 # Ask the user for their name
 print("hello,")
 print(name)
 Comments can also serve as to-do list for you.
Pseudocode
 Pseudocode is an important type of comment that becomes a special type of to-

do list, especially when you don’t understand how to accomplish a coding task.
For example, in your code, you might edit your code to say:

 # Print hello
 print("hello,")

 # Print the name inputted
 print(name)
Further Improving Your First Python Program

 We can further edit our code as follows:

 # Print hello and the inputted name
 print("hello, " + name)
 It turns out that some functions take many arguments.
 We can use a comma , to pass in multiple arguments by editing our code as
follows:

 # Print hello and the inputted name
 print("hello,", name)
The output in the terminal, if we typed “David” we would be hello, David.

Success.
Strings and Paremeters

 A string, known as a str in Python, is a sequence of text.
 Rewinding a bit in our code back to the following, there was a visual side effect
of having the result appear on multiple lines:
 print("hello,")
 print(name)
 Functions take arguments that influence their behavior. If we look at the
documentation for print you’ll notice we can learn a lot about the arguments that
the print function takes.
 Looking at this documentation, you’ll learn that the print function automatically
include a piece of code end='\n'. This \n indicates that the print function will
automatically create a line break when run. The print function takes an argument
called end` and the default is to create a new line.
 However, we can technically provide an argument for end ourselves such that a
new line is not created!
 We can modify our code as follows:
 print("hello,", end="")
 print(name)
By providing end="" we are over-writing the default value of end such that it
never creates a new line after this first print statement. Providing the name as
“David”, the output in the terminal window will be hello, David.
 Parameters, therefore, are arguments that can be taken by a function.

 You can learn more in Python’s documentation on print.
A small problem with quotation marks
 Notice how adding quotation marks as part of your string is challenging.

 print("hello,"friend"") will not work and the compiler will throw an error.
 Generally, there are two approaches to fixing this. First, you could simply
change the quotes to single quote marks.
 Another, more commonly used approach would be code
as print("hello, \"friend\""). The backslashes tell the compiler that the following
character should be considered a quotation mark in the string and avoid a
compiler error.
Formatting Strings
 Probably the most elegant way to use strings would be as follows:
 print(f"hello, {name}")
Notice the f in print(f"hello, {name}"). This f is a special indicator to Python to

treat this string a special way, different than previous approaches we have
illustrated in this lecture. Expect that you will be using this style of strings quite
frequently in this course.
More on Strings
 You should never expect your user will cooperate as intended. Therefore, you
will need to ensure that the input of your user is corrected or checked.
 It turns out that built into strings is the ability to remove whitespace from a
string.
 By utilizing the method strip on name as name = name.strip(), it will strip all the
whitespaces on the left and right of the users input. You can modify your code
to be:

 # Remove whitespace from the str
 name = name.strip()

 # Print the output
Rerunning this program, regardless of how many spaces you type before or
after the name, it will strip off all the whitespace.
 Using the title method, it would title case the user’s name:

 # Remove whitespace from the str
 name = name.strip()

 # Capitalize the first letter of each word
 name = name.title()

 By this point, you might be very tired of typing python repeatedly in the
terminal window. You cause us the up arrow of your keyboard to recall the
most recent terminal commands you have made.
 Notice that you can modify your code to be more efficient:

 # Remove whitespace from the str and capitalize the first letter of each word
 name = name.strip().title()

This creates the same result as your previous code.
 We could even go further!

 # Ask the user for their name, remove whitespace from the str and capitalize the first letter of
each word
 name = input("What's your name? ").strip().title()

 You can learn more about strings in Python’s documentation on str
Integers or int
 In Python, an integer is referred to as an int.
 In the world of mathematics, we are familiar with +, -, *, /, and % operators.
That last operator % or modulo operator may not be very familiar to you.
 You don’t have to use the text editor window in your compiler to run Python
code. Down in your terminal, you can run python alone. You will be presented
with >>> in the terminal window. You can then run live, interactive code. You
could type 1+1 and it will run that calculation. This mode will not commonly be
used during this course.
 Opening up VS Code again, we can type code calculator.py in the terminal. This
will create a new file in which we will create our own calculator.
 First, we can declare a few variables.
 x=1
 y=2

 z=x+y

 print(z)
Naturally, when we run python calculator.py we get the result in the terminal
window of 3. We can make this more interactive using the input function.
x = input("What's x? ")
y = input("What's y? ")
z=x+y
print(z)
 Running this program, we discover that the output is incorrect as 12. Why might
this be?
 Prior, we have seen how the + sign concatenates two strings. Because your
input from your keyboard on your computer comes into the compiler as text, it
is treated a string. We, therefore, need to convert this input from a string to an
integer. We can do so as follows:
 x = input("What's x? ")
 y = input("What's y? ")

 z = int(x) + int(y)

 print(z)
The result is now correct. The use of int(x), is called “casting” where a value is
temporarily changed from one type of variable (in this case a string) to another
(here, an integer).
 We can further improve our program as follows:
 x = int(input("What's x? "))
 y = int(input("What's y? "))

 print(x + y)
This illustrates that you can run functions on functions. The most inner function
is run first, and then the outer one is run. First, the input function is run. Then,
the int function.
 You can learn more in Python’s Documenation of int.
Readability Wins
 When deciding on your approach to a coding task, remember that one could
make a reasonable argument for many approaches to the same problem.
 Regardless of what approach you take to a programming task, remember that
your code must be readable. You should use comments to give yourself and
others clues about what your code is doing. Further, you should create code in a
way that is readable.
Float Basics
 A floating point value is a real number that has a decimal point in it, such
as 0.52.
 You can change your code to support floats as follows:
 x = float(input("What's x? "))
 y = float(input("What's y? "))

 print(x + y)
This change allows your user to enter 1.2 and 3.4 to present a total of 4.6.
 Let’s imagine, however, that you want to round the total to the nearest integer.
Looking at the Python documentation for round you’ll see that the available
arguments are round(number[n, ndigits]). Those square brackets indicate that
something optional can be specified by the programmer. Therefore, you could
do round(n) to round a digit to its nearest integer. Alternatively, you could code
as follows:
 # Get the user's input

 # Create a rounded result
 z = round(x + y)

 # Print the result
 print(z)
The output will be rounded to the nearest integer.
 What if we wanted to format the output of long numbers? For example, rather
than seeing 1000, you may wish to see 1,000. You could modify your code as
follows:

 # Create a rounded result
 z = round(x + y)

 # Print the formatted result
 print(f"{z:,}")
Though quite cryptic, that print(f"{z:,}") creates a scenario where the

outputted z will include commas where the result could look like 1,000 or 2,500.
More on Floats
 How can we round floating point values? First, modify your code as follows:

 # Calculate the result
 z=x/y

 print(z)
When inputting 2 as x and 3 as y, the result z is 0.6666666666 seemingly going

on to infinite as we might expect.
 Let’s imagine that we want to round this down, we could modify our code as
follows:

 # Calculate the result and round
 z = round(x / y, 2)

 print(z)
As we might expect, this will round the result to the nearest two decimal points.
 We could also use fstring to format the output as follows:

 # Calculate the result
 z=x/y

 print(f"{z:.2f}")
This cryptic fstring code displays the same as our prior rounding strategy.
 You can learn more in Python’s documentation of float.
Def
 Wouldn’t it be nice to create our own functions?
 Let’s bring back our final code of hello.py by typing code hello.py into the
terminal window. Your starting code should look as follows:
 # Ask the user for their name, remove whitespace from the str and capitalize the first letter of
each word
 name = input("What's your name? ").strip().title()

We can better our code to create our own special function that says “hello” for
us!
 Erasing all our code in our text editor, let’s start from scratch:
 hello()
 print(name)
Attempting to run this code, your compiler will throw an error. After all, there
is no defined function for hello.
 We can create our own function called hello as follows:

 def hello():
 print("hello")


 hello()
 print(name)
Notice that everything under def hello() is indented. Python is an indented

language. It uses indentation to understand what is part of the above function.
Therefore, everything in the hello function must be indented. When something is
not indented, it treats it as if it is not inside the hello function. Running python
hello.py in the terminal window, you’ll see that your output is not exactly as you
may want.
 We can further improve our code:


 # Create our own function
 def hello(to):
 print("hello,", to)


 # Output using our own function
 hello(name)
Here, in the first lines, you are creating your hello function. This time, however,
you are telling the compiler that this function takes a single parameter: a
variable called to. Therefore, when you call hello(name) the computer
passes name into the hello function as to. This is how we pass values into
functions. Very useful! Running python hello.py in the terminal window, you’ll
see that the output is much closer to our ideal presented earlier in this lecture.
 We can change our code to add a default value to hello:

 def hello(to="world"):


 hello(name)

 # Output without passing the expected arguments
 hello()
Test out your code yourself. Notice how the first hello will behave as you might
expect and the second hello, which is not passed a value, will by default
output hello, world.
 We don’t have to have our function at the start of our program. We can move it
down, but we need to tell the compiler that we have a main function and we
have a separate hello function.
 def main():

 hello(name)

 hello()


This alone, however, will create an error of sorts. If we run python

hello.py nothing happens! The reason for this is that nothing in this code is
actually calling the main function and bringing our program to life.
 The following very small modification will call the main function and restore
our program to working order:
 def main():

 hello(name)

 hello()




 main()
Returning Values
 You can imagine many scenarios where you don’t just want a function to
perform an action, but also to return a value back to the main function. For
example, rather than simply printing the calculation of x + y, you may want a
function to return the value of this calculation back to another part of your
program. This “passing back” of a value we call a return value.
 Returning to our calculator.py code by typing code calculator.py. Erase all code
there. Rework the code as follows:
 def main():
 x = int(input("What's x? "))
 print("x squared is", square(x))


 def square(n):
 return n * n


 main()
Effectively, x is passed to square. Then, the calculation of x * x is returned back
to the main function.
Summing Up
Through the work of this single lecture, you have learned abilities that you will use countless
times in your own programs. You have learned about…
 Creating your first programs in Python;

 Functions;
 Bugs;
 Variables;
 Comments;
 Pseudocode;
 Strings;
 Parameters;
 Formatted Strings;
 Integers;
 Principles of readability;
 Floats;
 Creating your own functions; and
 Return values.

Functions, and Variables

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Functions, and Variables

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Creating Code with Python

Improving Your First Python Program

 A variable is just a container for a value within your own program.

 If you edit your code as follows, you will notice an error

 Pseudocode is an important type of comment that becomes a special type of to-

Further Improving Your First Python Program

The output in the terminal, if we typed “David” we would be hello, David.

Strings and Paremeters

 Parameters, therefore, are arguments that can be taken by a function.

A small problem with quotation marks

 Notice how adding quotation marks as part of your string is challenging.

Notice the f in print(f"hello, {name}"). This f is a special indicator to Python to

This creates the same result as your previous code.

 We could even go further!

 You can learn more in Python’s Documenation of int.

The output will be rounded to the nearest integer.

Though quite cryptic, that print(f"{z:,}") creates a scenario where the

When inputting 2 as x and 3 as y, the result z is 0.6666666666 seemingly going

 You can learn more in Python’s documentation of float.

 We can create our own function called hello as follows:

Notice that everything under def hello() is indented. Python is an indented

 We can further improve our code:

 We can change our code to add a default value to hello:

This alone, however, will create an error of sorts. If we run python

 Creating your first programs in Python;

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