Code as a Liberal Art, Spring 2021

Unit 1, Exercise 2 homework

Due: Tuesday, February 2, 8pm

  1. Review the class notes for this week.

  2. Start with the code to find the smallest number in a list. Can you modify this to find the word in a list that is last alphabetically?

  3. Here is a bit of code to read a text file: 
    file = open("FILENAME.txt","r")

word_list = []
for line in file:
    for word in line.split():
        word_list.append(word)

    Make a new Python file and put that bit of code at the top. Replace "FILENAME" with the name of your file, and make sure it is a plain text file in the same directory as your Python script. You can create a plain text file by copying some text from anywhere into a new file in Atom and saving it.

    1. Now, word_list will contain a list of all the words in the file. Can you combine this with the previous exercise to find the alphabetically last word from the file?

    2. Python has a command called len(), which will tell you the length of a string. For example, you would write: len(word). Can you use this to modify the previous part so that instead of finding the alphabetically last word, your code finds the longest word in the file?

  4. Read the page about asking for help on the class website. Follow the instructions there to create a Gist account if you don't already have one. Then create a new Gist and share it with me. If you haven't encountered any coding problems this week, you can just use it to share a file with a note telling me that everything is working. The goal here is to test out Gist and make sure that we'll be able to use it this semester.