40 Algorithms Every Programmer Should Know

Using snippets

With the popularity of simple but powerful coding language such as Python, an alternative approach is becoming popular, which is to represent the logic of the algorithm directly in the programming language in a somewhat simplified version. Like pseudocode, this selected code captures the important logic and structure of the proposed algorithm, avoiding detailed code. This selected code is sometimes called a snippet. In this book, snippets are used instead of pseudocode wherever possible as they save one additional step. For example, let's look at a simple snippet that is about a Python function that can be used to swap two variables:

define swap(x, y)    buffer = x    x = y    y = buffer

Note that snippets cannot always replace pseudocode. ...