Exercises in Programming Style

Chapter 1

Good Old Times

1.1 Constraints

• Very small amount of primary memory, typically orders of magnitude smaller than the data that needs to be processed/generated.
• No identifiers – i.e. no variable names or tagged memory addresses. All we have is memory that is addressable with numbers.

1.2 A Program in this Style

  1 #!/usr/bin/env python
  2
  3 import sys, os, string
  4
  5 # Utility for handling the intermediate 'secondary memory'
  6 def touchopen(filename, *args, **kwargs):
  7 try:
  8  os.remove(filename)
  9 except OSError:
 10   pass
 11 open(filename, "a").close() # "touch" file
 12 return open(filename, *args, **kwargs)
 13
 14 # The constrained memory ...