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  • java vs python. In what way is Java Better?

    - by oxinabox.ucc.asn.au
    What are the advantages of Java over Python? What are the disadvantagesof Python, over Java? Why isn't Java more like Python? Like why don't java have an command line iterpretor? I beleive Java must have some advantages, but...I'm yet to see them. Logically all languages have an advantage afaict: I learnt java before python, - a 6 month unicourse. I spend a couple of weeks using python (writting a script to make a C source file). I hated it at first (as it was so differnt from C). I realised I had fallen in love it it, when I noticed that when I went to do a follow on Java Course at uni, I'ld stopped giving my variables types, and was tryign to multiply strings.

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  • What statistics can be maintained for a set of numerical data without iterating?

    - by Dan Tao
    Update Just for future reference, I'm going to list all of the statistics that I'm aware of that can be maintained in a rolling collection, recalculated as an O(1) operation on every addition/removal (this is really how I should've worded the question from the beginning): Obvious Count Sum Mean Max* Min* Median** Less Obvious Variance Standard Deviation Skewness Kurtosis Mode*** Weighted Average Weighted Moving Average**** OK, so to put it more accurately: these are not "all" of the statistics I'm aware of. They're just the ones that I can remember off the top of my head right now. *Can be recalculated in O(1) for additions only, or for additions and removals if the collection is sorted (but in this case, insertion is not O(1)). Removals potentially incur an O(n) recalculation for non-sorted collections. **Recalculated in O(1) for a sorted, indexed collection only. ***Requires a fairly complex data structure to recalculate in O(1). ****This can certainly be achieved in O(1) for additions and removals when the weights are assigned in a linearly descending fashion. In other scenarios, I'm not sure. Original Question Say I maintain a collection of numerical data -- let's say, just a bunch of numbers. For this data, there are loads of calculated values that might be of interest; one example would be the sum. To get the sum of all this data, I could... Option 1: Iterate through the collection, adding all the values: double sum = 0.0; for (int i = 0; i < values.Count; i++) sum += values[i]; Option 2: Maintain the sum, eliminating the need to ever iterate over the collection just to find the sum: void Add(double value) { values.Add(value); sum += value; } void Remove(double value) { values.Remove(value); sum -= value; } EDIT: To put this question in more relatable terms, let's compare the two options above to a (sort of) real-world situation: Suppose I start listing numbers out loud and ask you to keep them in your head. I start by saying, "11, 16, 13, 12." If you've just been remembering the numbers themselves and nothing more, and then I say, "What's the sum?", you'd have to think to yourself, "OK, what's 11 + 16 + 13 + 12?" before responding, "52." If, on the other hand, you had been keeping track of the sum yourself while I was listing the numbers (i.e., when I said, "11" you thought "11", when I said "16", you thought, "27," and so on), you could answer "52" right away. Then if I say, "OK, now forget the number 16," if you've been keeping track of the sum inside your head you can simply take 16 away from 52 and know that the new sum is 36, rather than taking 16 off the list and them summing up 11 + 13 + 12. So my question is, what other calculations, other than the obvious ones like sum and average, are like this? SECOND EDIT: As an arbitrary example of a statistic that (I'm almost certain) does require iteration -- and therefore cannot be maintained as simply as a sum or average -- consider if I asked you, "how many numbers in this collection are divisible by the min?" Let's say the numbers are 5, 15, 19, 20, 21, 25, and 30. The min of this set is 5, which divides into 5, 15, 20, 25, and 30 (but not 19 or 21), so the answer is 5. Now if I remove 5 from the collection and ask the same question, the answer is now 2, since only 15 and 30 are divisible by the new min of 15; but, as far as I can tell, you cannot know this without going through the collection again. So I think this gets to the heart of my question: if we can divide kinds of statistics into these categories, those that are maintainable (my own term, maybe there's a more official one somewhere) versus those that require iteration to compute any time a collection is changed, what are all the maintainable ones? What I am asking about is not strictly the same as an online algorithm (though I sincerely thank those of you who introduced me to that concept). An online algorithm can begin its work without having even seen all of the input data; the maintainable statistics I am seeking will certainly have seen all the data, they just don't need to reiterate through it over and over again whenever it changes.

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  • translate by replacing words inside existing text

    - by Berry Tsakala
    What are common approaches for translating certain words (or expressions) inside a given text, when the text must be reconstructed (with punctuations and everythin.) ? The translation comes from a lookup table, and covers words, collocations, and emoticons like L33t, CUL8R, :-), etc. Simple string search-and-replace is not enough since it can replace part of longer words (cat dog ? caterpillar dogerpillar). Assume the following input: s = "dogbert, started a dilbert dilbertion proces cat-bert :-)" after translation, i should receive something like: result = "anna, started a george dilbertion process cat-bert smiley" I can't simply tokenize, since i loose punctuations and word positions. Regular expressions, works for normal words, but don't catch special expressions like the smiley :-) but it does . re.sub(r'\bword\b','translation',s) ==> translation re.sub(r'\b:-\)\b','smiley',s) ==> :-) for now i'm using the above mentioned regex, and simple replace for the non-alphanumeric words, but it's far from being bulletproof. (p.s. i'm using python)

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  • How to restrain one's self from the overwhelming urge to rewrite everything?

    - by Scott Saad
    Setup Have you ever had the experience of going into a piece of code to make a seemingly simple change and then realizing that you've just stepped into a wasteland that deserves some serious attention? This usually gets followed up with an official FREAK OUT moment, where the overwhelming feeling of rewriting everything in sight starts to creep up. It's important to note that this bad code does not necessarily come from others as it may indeed be something we've written or contributed to in the past. Problem It's obvious that there is some serious code rot, horrible architecture, etc. that needs to be dealt with. The real problem, as it relates to this question, is that it's not the right time to rewrite the code. There could be many reasons for this: Currently in the middle of a release cycle, therefore any changes should be minimal. It's 2:00 AM in the morning, and the brain is starting to shut down. It could have seemingly adverse affects on the schedule. The rabbit hole could go much deeper than our eyes are able to see at this time. etc... Question So how should we balance the duty of continuously improving the code, while also being a responsible developer? How do we refrain from contributing to the broken window theory, while also being aware of actions and the potential recklessness they may cause? Update Great answers! For the most part, there seems to be two schools of thought: Don't resist the urge as it's a good one to have. Don't give in to the temptation as it will burn you to the ground. It would be interesting to know if more people feel any balance exists.

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  • How do you read a file line by line in your language of choice?

    - by Jon Ericson
    I got inspired to try out Haskell again based on a recent answer. My big block is that reading a file line by line (a task made simple in languages such as Perl) seems complicated in a functional language. How do you read a file line by line in your favorite language? So that we are comparing apples to other types of apples, please write a program that numbers the lines of the input file. So if your input is: Line the first. Next line. End of communication. The output would look like: 1 Line the first. 2 Next line. 3 End of communication. I will post my Haskell program as an example. Ken commented that this question does not specify how errors should be handled. I'm not overly concerned about it because: Most answers did the obvious thing and read from stdin and wrote to stdout. The nice thing is that it puts the onus on the user to redirect those streams the way they want. So if stdin is redirected from a non-existent file, the shell will take care of reporting the error, for instance. The question is more aimed at how a language does IO than how it handles exceptions. But if necessary error handling is missing in an answer, feel free to either edit the code to fix it or make a note in the comments.

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  • Semantic Diff Utilities

    - by rubancache
    I'm trying to find some good examples of semantic diff/merge utilities. The traditional paradigm of comparing source code files works by comparing lines and characters.. but are there any utilities out there (for any language) that actually consider the structure of code when comparing files? For example, existing diff programs will report "difference found at character 2 of line 125. File x contains v-o-i-d, where file y contains b-o-o-l". A specialized tool should be able to report "Return type of method doSomething() changed from void to bool". I would argue that this type of semantic information is actually what the user is looking for when comparing code, and should be the goal of next-generation progamming tools. Are there any examples of this in available tools?

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  • Why do static Create methods exist?

    - by GeReV
    I was wondering, why do static Create methods exist? For instance, why use this code: System.Xml.XmlReader reader = System.Xml.XmlReader.Create(inputUri); over this code: System.Xml.XmlReader reader = new System.Xml.XmlReader(inputUri); I cannot find the rationale for using one over the other, and can't find any relation between classes who use this construct over the other. Can anyone shed some light on this?

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  • Examples of monoids/semigroups in programming

    - by jkff
    It is well-known that monoids are stunningly ubiquitous in programing. They are so ubiquitous and so useful that I, as a 'hobby project', am working on a system that is completely based on their properties (distributed data aggregation). To make the system useful I need useful monoids :) I already know of these: Numeric or matrix sum Numeric or matrix product Minimum or maximum under a total order with a top or bottom element (more generally, join or meet in a bounded lattice, or even more generally, product or coproduct in a category) Set union Map union where conflicting values are joined using a monoid Intersection of subsets of a finite set (or just set intersection if we speak about semigroups) Intersection of maps with a bounded key domain (same here) Merge of sorted sequences, perhaps with joining key-equal values in a different monoid/semigroup Bounded merge of sorted lists (same as above, but we take the top N of the result) Cartesian product of two monoids or semigroups List concatenation Endomorphism composition. Now, let us define a quasi-property of an operation as a property that holds up to an equivalence relation. For example, list concatenation is quasi-commutative if we consider lists of equal length or with identical contents up to permutation to be equivalent. Here are some quasi-monoids and quasi-commutative monoids and semigroups: Any (a+b = a or b, if we consider all elements of the carrier set to be equivalent) Any satisfying predicate (a+b = the one of a and b that is non-null and satisfies some predicate P, if none does then null; if we consider all elements satisfying P equivalent) Bounded mixture of random samples (xs+ys = a random sample of size N from the concatenation of xs and ys; if we consider any two samples with the same distribution as the whole dataset to be equivalent) Bounded mixture of weighted random samples Which others do exist?

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  • What is your longest-held programming assumption that turned out to be incorrect?

    - by Demi
    I am doing some research into common errors and poor assumptions made by junior (and perhaps senior) software engineers. What was your longest-held poor assumption that was eventually corrected? For example: I at one point failed to understand that the size of an integer was not a standard (depends on the language and target). A bit embarrassing to state, but there it is. Be frank: what hard-held belief did you have, and roughly how long did you maintain the assumption? It can be about an algorithm, a language, a programming concept, testing, anything under the computer science domain.

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  • Am I immoral for using a variable name that differs from its type only by case?

    - by Jason Baker
    For instance, take this piece of code: var person = new Person(); or for you Pythonistas: person = Person() I'm told constantly how bad this is, but have yet to see an example of the immorality of these two lines of code. To me, person is a Person and trying to give it another name is a waste of time. I suppose in the days before syntax highlighting, this would have been a big deal. But these days, it's pretty easy to tell a type name apart from a variable name. Heck, it's even easy to see the difference here on SO. Or is there something I'm missing? If so, it would be helpful if you could provide an example of code that causes problems.

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  • Code golf: combining multiple sorted lists into a single sorted list

    - by Alabaster Codify
    Implement an algorithm to merge an arbitrary number of sorted lists into one sorted list. The aim is to create the smallest working programme, in whatever language you like. For example: input: ((1, 4, 7), (2, 5, 8), (3, 6, 9)) output: (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) input: ((1, 10), (), (2, 5, 6, 7)) output: (1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 10) Note: solutions which concatenate the input lists then use a language-provided sort function are not in-keeping with the spirit of golf, and will not be accepted: sorted(sum(lists,[])) # cheating: out of bounds! Apart from anything else, your algorithm should be (but doesn't have to be) a lot faster! Clearly state the language, any foibles and the character count. Only include meaningful characters in the count, but feel free to add whitespace to the code for artistic / readability purposes. To keep things tidy, suggest improvement in comments or by editing answers where appropriate, rather than creating a new answer for each "revision". EDIT: if I was submitting this question again, I would expand on the "no language provided sort" rule to be "don't concatenate all the lists then sort the result". Existing entries which do concatenate-then-sort are actually very interesting and compact, so I won't retro-actively introduce a rule they break, but feel free to work to the more restrictive spec in new submissions. Inspired by http://stackoverflow.com/questions/464342/combining-two-sorted-lists-in-python

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  • Why is it useful to count the number of bits?

    - by Scorchin
    I've seen the numerous questions about counting the number of set bits in a insert type of input, but why is it useful? For those looking for algorithms about bit counting, look here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1517848/counting-common-bits-in-a-sequence-of-unsigned-longs http://stackoverflow.com/questions/472325/fastest-way-to-count-number-of-bit-transitions-in-an-unsigned-int http://stackoverflow.com/questions/109023/best-algorithm-to-count-the-number-of-set-bits-in-a-32-bit-integer

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  • Parsing language for both binary and character files

    - by Thorsten S.
    The problem: You have some data and your program needs specified input. For example strings which are numbers. You are searching for a way to transform the original data in a format you need. And the problem is: The source can be anything. It can be XML, property lists, binary which contains the needed data deeply embedded in binary junk. And your output format may vary also: It can be number strings, float, doubles.... You don't want to program. You want routines which gives you commands capable to transform the data in a form you wish. Surely it contains regular expressions, but it is very good designed and it offers capabilities which are sometimes much more easier and more powerful. Something like a super-grep which you can access (!) as program routines, not only as tool. It allows: joining/grouping/merging of results inserting/deleting/finding/replacing write macros which allows to execute a command chain repeatedly meta-grouping (lists-tables-hypertables) Example (No, I am not looking for a solution to this, it is just an example): You want to read xml strings embedded in a binary file with variable length records. Your tool reads the record length and deletes the junk surrounding your text. Now it splits open the xml and extracts the strings. Being Indian number glyphs and containing decimal commas instead of decimal points, your tool transforms it into ASCII and replaces commas with points. Now the results must be stored into matrices of variable length....etc. etc. I am searching for a good language / language-design and if possible, an implementation. Which design do you like or even, if it does not fulfill the conditions, wouldn't you want to miss ? EDIT: The question is if a solution for the problem exists and if yes, which implementations are available. You DO NOT implement your own sorting algorithm if Quicksort, Mergesort and Heapsort is available. You DO NOT invent your own text parsing method if you have regular expressions. You DO NOT invent your own 3D language for graphics if OpenGL/Direct3D is available. There are existing solutions or at least papers describing the problem and giving suggestions. And there are people who may have worked and experienced such problems and who can give ideas and suggestions. The idea that this problem is totally new and I should work out and implement it myself without background knowledge seems for me, I must admit, totally off the mark.

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  • UK Postcode search

    - by Imran
    I want to build a website where you can search by entering the postcode (UK). I know that RoyalMail owns the Database to do this (it's only very expensive, $100K). What are my options?

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  • Segmenting a double array of labels

    - by Ami
    The Problem: I have a large double array populated with various labels. Each element (cell) in the double array contains a set of labels and some elements in the double array may be empty. I need an algorithm to cluster elements in the double array into discrete segments. A segment is defined as a set of pixels that are adjacent within the double array and one label that all those pixels in the segment have in common. (Diagonal adjacency doesn't count and I'm not clustering empty cells). |-------|-------|------| | Jane | Joe | | | Jack | Jane | | |-------|-------|------| | Jane | Jane | | | | Joe | | |-------|-------|------| | | Jack | Jane | | | Joe | | |-------|-------|------| In the above arrangement of labels distributed over nine elements, the largest cluster is the “Jane” cluster occupying the four upper left cells. What I've Considered: I've considered iterating through every label of every cell in the double array and testing to see if the cell-label combination under inspection can be associated with a preexisting segment. If the element under inspection cannot be associated with a preexisting segment it becomes the first member of a new segment. If the label/cell combination can be associated with a preexisting segment it associates. Of course, to make this method reasonable I'd have to implement an elaborate hashing system. I'd have to keep track of all the cell-label combinations that stand adjacent to preexisting segments and are in the path of the incrementing indices that are iterating through the double array. This hash method would avoid having to iterate through every pixel in every preexisting segment to find an adjacency. Why I Don't Like it: As is, the above algorithm doesn't take into consideration the case where an element in the double array can be associated with two unique segments, one in the horizontal direction and one in the vertical direction. To handle these cases properly, I would need to implement a test for this specific case and then implement a method that will both associate the element under inspection with a segment and then concatenate the two adjacent identical segments. On the whole, this method and the intricate hashing system that it would require feels very inelegant. Additionally, I really only care about finding the large segments in the double array and I'm much more concerned with the speed of this algorithm than with the accuracy of the segmentation, so I'm looking for a better way. I assume there is some stochastic method for doing this that I haven't thought of. Any suggestions?

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  • how to read an address in multiple formats like google maps

    - by ratan
    notice that on google maps you can input the address any way you like. as long as it is a valid address...google maps will read it. In some ruby book I had seen code snippet for something like this, but with phone numbers. Any ideas how this could be done for addresses? in language of your choice. EDIT: i dont care about a "valid" address. I just want to parse an address. so that 123 fake street, WA, 34223 would be an address and so will 123 fake street WA 34223

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