Question

Develop a response to the questions below, which will address the basic concepts of programming. Remember to use your textbook and other academic resources to justify your responses. Plausible responses to the questions below will also be discussed in class.

1. Functions are the initial steps in modularizing your code to make it easier to manage and reuse. When you create a function, several procedural aspects change from writing the code in line with the rest of the code. The function must be defined, the function must be called, parameters may need to be passed in, and values may need to be returned. Describe a program of your choosing and the parts of the program that would be modularized in functions, what would need to be passed into the function when it is called, and what would be passed out of the function when it completes is anything.
2. Not all functions are written by you; in fact, the vast majority of the functions you call will be built into the language or imported in a module. What are some built in functions you feel you will use regularly what are some libraries you think will be useful and for what?
3. Built in functions and modules that come with languages are attractive to programmers. Identify a library that makes Python stand out in one particular area of programming that may make it the language of choice for that area of development.

Answer 1

• In order to create programs that are readable, reliable, maintainable, we modularize the whole program, breaking one complex program into smaller , simpler parts.

To do so, we create functions, which is called to process the passed value and returns the processed value.

For eg:-

We could write a function which would return the perimeter of a square:-

#Fibonacci function
def Fibo(x):
    if x<=0:
        print("Incorrect input")
    # First Fibonacci number is 0
    elif x==1:
        return 0
    # Second Fibonacci number is 1
    elif x==2:
        return 1
    else:
        return Fibonacci(x-1)+Fibonacci(x-2)
 
#Driver Program for the above function
 print(Fibonacci(9))
 

The above function would return the xth fibonacci number.

In this case, that would be 21.

Here, the value of x is passed into the function when it is called, and the function passes out the value of xth fibonacci number on its completion.

• The most used function in python or any other language would be a function to accept an input from the use or print the output.These can be called as the input-output or I/O functions.

In python, print() [print function] is used to display the output on the screen. It is a built-in function.

Another most common set of functions used are math functions, such as abs(), round(), sqrt(), etc.

In order to perform string operations, functions like append(), upper(), lower(), etc. are used.

• Python being widely used for Data Science has libraries such as Numpy, Pandas, Matplotlib, Scipy, Scikit-learn, which are widely used in the field.

Numpy is a library, used to perform operations on multi-dimensional arrays and manage them.Numpy is the one of the most essential library as other libraries such as Pandas, Matplotlib , Scipy are built on Numpy.

Pandas library is used to manage the two-dimensional data-tables in Python, in the form of a database. Data can be loaded into data frames and operations could be performed on the selected data.

Matplotlib is a data-visualisation library. It helps to understand the data in an effecient way, by providing a visual of the same. It allows to create line graphs, pie charts, histograms, etc.One can customize every aspect of the figure according to the needs.

Scipy is used to perform scientific mathematical procedures such as optimization, linear algebra, interpolation, FFT, image processing, etc. as it contains various sub-modules to perform the same.

Scikit-learn is used for data-mining and data analysis.It is used to implement algorithms on datasets and solve real-world problems.

Due to the above libraries Python is widely used in Data Science, as it helps to solve complex problems easily with its supply of large collection of libraries that help to do so.

Comment in case of any doubts.