Exercises in Programming Style

Chapter 5

Pipeline

5.1 Constraints

• Larger problem is decomposed using functionl abstraction. Functions take input, and produce output.
• No shared state between functions.
• The larger problem is solved by composing functions one after the other, in pipeline, as a faithful reproduction of mathematical function composition f g.

5.2 A Program in this Style

  1 #!/usr/bin/env python
  2 import sys, re, operator, string
  3
  4 #
  5 # The functions
  6 #
  7 def read_file(path_to_file):
  8 """
  9 Takes a path to a file and returns the entire
 10 contents of the file ...