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Predefined functions

Learning Intentions

  • Understand the term 'predefined function'

  • Identify and use appropriate predefined functions

Success Criteria

  • Be able to explain the term predefined function
  • Be able to identify and describe the predefined functions specified at Higher level

Predefined functions

  • A pre-defined function carries out an operation or calculation using the data we give (pass) it and returns a single value.  The functions listed below are relevant to the course content for National 5:
    • Round
    • Length
    • Random
  • The SQA sometimes refers to built-in object functions as predefined functions, when in actual fact they are not. If you want to find out more about this, look up object methods in Python.

An example: the YASS language

National 5

  • At National 5 you looked at the following predefined function:

    • Random

    • Round

    • Length

  • Let's take a quick look at them again

Random

  • The random predefined function generates a random number between a range in Python:

import random

#Generates a number between 10 and 100
print(random.randint(10, 100))

Round

  • The round function rounds a number to a specified number of decimal places.

x = 3.145

#Will give us 3.15
print(round(x, 2))

#Will give us 3.0
print(round(x, 0))

Length

  • The length function is used to calculate the length of an array.

fib = [1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89]
#Should print 10
print (len(fib))

In your jotter, write down an example of how each of the predefined function shown before could be used in Python

Task

Higher Predefined functions

  • For Higher level, you need to know three more predefined functions:

    • Substrings

    • Convert ASCII characters to integers and vice versa

    • Casting function to convert a floating point to integer

    • Modulus

Substrings

name = "John Smith"

print(name[0])
print(name[0:3])
print(name[5:8])
  • A substring is a part of string. For example, the word “Hello world” has substrings such as:
    • Hello
    • World
    • Hell
    • llo
  • To obtain a substring in Python, you need to use the subscript operator syntax (substring syntax):

Substrings

name = "John Smith"

print(name[0])
print(name[0:3])
print(name[5:8])

Python's index selection here, just like with a normal array, is from the start character (non-inclusive) index to the last character index (inclusive).

For each of the following, write what you think the output from the substring predefined function would be when:

name = "Hello Class"

 

print(name[0:5])

print(name[7:11])

print(name[0:4])

Warm up

Character to ASCII

char1 = "A"
print(ord(char1))
  • As you may remember from National 5, ASCII is the encoding system used by computers to represent characters (both special characters and characters from the keyboard)
  • In ASCII, the letter A is represented by the integer 65.
  • The Python ord function can convert a character to it's ASCII integer representation:

aSCII to Character

ascii_no = 65
print(chr(ascii_no))
  • To convert an integer representation of an ASCII value back into a character, we use the chr function:

Using Python, convert the following characters to their ASCII integer representation:

 

  1. P
  2. !
  3. $

Warm up

Using Python, convert the integers to characters

 

 

  1. 93
  2. 45
  3. 71

Converting an floating point to an integer value

  • Another predefined function is the conversion of a floating point number to an integer.
  • This is done with the floor function
  • Floor simply rounds down at all times.
import math
x = 5.31
print(math.floor(x))

Modular arithmetic

  • Modular arithmetic is one of the most useful kinds of mathematics in existence today, as such most programming languages exploit a method of returning a remainder value of a sum.
  • Performing a mod operation results in the remainder being returned.
  • In Python, the modulus operator (modulo) is represented by a % sign.
  • For example:
    • 5 % 2 = 1
    • 10 % 7 = 3
    • 21 % 7 = 0

Modular arithmetic

  • What's really handy about modulus is how easy it is to figure out if a number is even or not by simply performing a % 2 operation on the number:
    • 0 % 2 = 0
    • 1 % 2 = 1
    • 2 % 2 = 0
    • 3 % 2 = 1
    • 4 % 2 = 0
    • 5 % 2 = 1
  • Any time that the return value is 1 the number is negative.

Using modular arithmetic, write a program in Python to display all numbers which are factors of 20 up to 200.

Task

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Predefined Functions
© 2020 - 2024 J Balfour
15:26 | 29-04-2024
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