Functions, variables, and debugging; Restarting my DS, AI & ML Journey

Building awesome stuff has always excited me and while I’ve tried learning low-key, it’s time I leveraged public accountability for better results.

Today, I review the basic concepts of Python, here are the top insights I got;

I’m beginning to ask deeper questions.

Why doesn’t this code work if I tweak it this way? Asking such questions even though I’ll still resolve the issue helped me understand how code processing systems work, which is relevant for problem solving or debugging.

Functions

These are basically blocks of code that execute a particular task. You can call them later on to display a result. The example below shows a variable, x, containing “awesome.” That’s a global variable.

I created a function, myfunc(), and created another variable x, this time, containing “fantastic.” This is a local variable because its within a function. When I call myfunc(), the output would be “Python is fantastic,” but when I call the in-built python function, the output would be “Python is awesome” because that function is not within the previous function. Amazing rightttt!

It gets better. If I add the global keyword to var x within the defined function, the in-built function will retire the previous global variable and set the local one to be global.

Debugging:

I found that if you define print as a function, and add a line of code for an in-built print function to display a result, and then call the first print function, you create an infinite loop of print calling itself over and over again leading to a recursion error. That made me ask myself, what if it was a normal code and the function was different, what actually terminates the call process? Found out that its the in-built print responsible for displaying result. So my experiment was an infinite loop because right after the in-built print terminates, print() calls it again and the process begins over again.

Whew! By the way, I’ll also be reading books on AI & ML as I proceed. Thanks for reading.

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