A Quick Guide to Formatting
This section provides a brief overview of the code formatting style that will be used throughout this text. You are not expected to understand the details of the code, here. This merely provides a guide for what is to come.
Any code that is included in-line within plain text will be formatted distinctly as so: “the variable
x was updated…”. Such items will be distinguished with backticks wherever such formatting is not available. Take for example the following commented line within Python code:
# the variable `x` will be updated
Python code will be displayed within distinct, colorized code blocks. These will typically begin with a comment, which is meant to serve as a caption that summarizes the purpose of the code block:
# demonstrating a basic for-loop cnt = 0 for i in range(10): cnt += 1 #`cnt` is now 10
>>> appears within code blocks to indicate “console-style” code, which distinguishes between code being entered by a user and the resulting output. The purpose of this is that it allows us to easily display the result of a computation without having to rely on calling the
1 to the variable
x, and then displays the result of
x + 2:
# demonstrating the distinction of # input and output via >>> >>> x = 1 >>> x + 2 3
The code blocks throughout a given section of the text should be understood to be persistent even if there is a mix of “pure” code blocks and “console-style” code blocks. For example, a function may be defined at the beginning of a section, and then referenced throughout the rest of that section:
# defining an example function def my_func(x): return x**2
We can spend some time talking about
my_func and then see it in action:
# demonstrating `my_func` >>> my_func(10.) 100.
Lastly, the input and output of an iPython console and a Jupyter notebook alike is displayed as follows:
2 + 3
Running Code Snippets from this Site
In PLYMI, we typically precede every code snippet with one or more commented lines. This is useful because it makes a page more “skimmable”, since the code snippets essentially come with descriptive, self-explanatory captions. That being said, there is a downside to this.
Python terminals don’t like having multiple comment lines precede an input-prompt. E.g. if you paste and run the following code into a terminal
# demonstrating the distinction of # input and output via >>> >>> x = 1
you will get a syntax error. To fix this issue, simply exclude the comments when you copy this block to your clipboard. Running
>>> x = 1
will work without any issue. Keep this in mind if you ever find yourself having trouble running code that you copied from this site.