Methods I HW6 style notes

HW6-style-notes.md

HW6 style notes

The following were common style issues seen in HW6:

• When indexing into a list or tuple x, x[0:10] is redundant; just write x[:10].

• Similarly, the last ten elements of x are given by x[-10:] and other forms are either redundant or wrong.

• Avoid "noop" list comprehensions. For instance if lexicon is a list,

  new_lexicon = [item for item in lexicon]

  does nothing other than (slowly and obfuscatorily) making a copy of the lexicon. Or, if lexicon is a set and one desireds to convert it to a list, just use the faster:

  lexicon_list = list(lexicon)

• If you want to convert a set to a sorted list, just use sorted. Converting it to a list and then sorting it in place with .sort is, once again, slow and obfuscatory.

• If you want to sort by length, just use the built-in len function as the key:

  lexicon_by_length = sorted(lexicon, key=len)

  In this case there is no need to define a helper function.

• When you're iterating over the lines of a file, you almost always want to .rstrip() the line before further processing. Make the following a habit:

  for line in source:
      line = line.rstrip()  # Gets rid of trailing newline.
      ...

• line.split(" ") is redundant. Just write line.split() since it already splits on whitespace by default.