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The document provides an introduction to programming with Python, covering basic concepts such as creating a simple program, using functions, handling errors (bugs), and improving code with variables and comments. It explains how to personalize programs, manage user input, and format strings, as well as the importance of readability in coding. Additionally, it touches on data types like integers and floats, and demonstrates how to perform calculations and format outputs.
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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
5 views13 pagesCS50 Lecture 0 Notes
The document provides an introduction to programming with Python, covering basic concepts such as creating a simple program, using functions, handling errors (bugs), and improving code with variables and comments. It explains how to personalize programs, manage user input, and format strings, as well as the importance of readability in coding. Additionally, it touches on data types like integers and floats, and demonstrates how to perform calculations and format outputs.
Uploaded by
mepejap566Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
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/ 13
5/19/25, 9:15 PM Lecture 0 - 6850's Introduction to Programming with Python
CS50’s Introduction to Programming with Python
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Lecture 0
Creating Code with Python
hitpsses50 narvard.edulpython/2022/notes/0 511325, 2:15 PM Lecture 0 - 6850's Intodton to Programming wth Python
= VS Code is a text editor. In addition to editing text, you can visually browse files and run
text-based commands at a terminal.
| Inthe terminal, you can execute code hello.py to start coding.
@ Inthe text editor above, you can type print(“hello, world") . This is a famous canonical
program that nearly all coders write during their learning process.
® In the terminal window, you can execute commands. To run this program, you are going to
need to move your cursor to the bottom of the screen, clicking in the terminal window.
You can now type a second command in the terminal window. Next to the dollar sign, type
python hello.py and press the enter key on your keyboard.
@ Recall that computers really only understand zeros and ones. Therefore, when you run
python hello.py , python will interpret the text that you created in hello.py and
translate it into the zeros and ones that the computer can understand.
= The result of running the python hello.py program is hello, world
© Congrats! You just created your first program,
Functions
= Functions are verbs or actions that the computer or computer language will already know
how to perform.
@ Inyour hello.py program,the print function knows how to print to the terminal
window.
= The print function takes arguments. In this case, "hello, world” are the arguments
that the print function takes.
Bugs
= Bugs are a natural part of coding. These are mistakes, problems for you to solve! Don't get
discouraged! This is part of the process of becoming a great programmer.
@ Imagine in our hello.py program that accidentally typed print("hello, world" notice
that we missed the final.) required by the. If | purposefully make this mistake, the
interpreter will output an error in the terminal window!
= Often, the error messages will inform you of your mistakes and provide you clues on how
to fix them. However, there will be many times when the interpreter is not this kind,
Improving Your First Python Program
= We can personalize your first Python program.
= In our text editor in hello.py we can add another function. input is a function that
takes a prompt as an argument. We can edit our code to say
-ntp:ifes50.harvard.edufpythor/2022/notes/0! ans 513126, 9:15 PM Lecture 0 - 6850's Introduction to Programming with Python
input ("What's your name? ")
print(“hello, world")
© This edit alone, however, will not allow your program to output what your user inputs. For
that, we will need to introduce you to variables
Variables
® variable is just a container for a value within your own program.
© In your program, you can introduce your own variable in your program by editing it to read
name
print
input ("What's your name? ")
hello, world")
Notice that this equal = sign in the middle of name = input("what's your name? ")
has a special role in programming. This equal sign literally assigns what is on the right to
what is on the left. Therefore, the value returned by input("what's your name? ") is
assigned to _nane .
= Ifyou edit your code as follows, you will notice an error
name = input("What's your name? ")
print("hello, name")
= The program will return hello, name in the terminal window regardless of what the user
types.
= Further editing our code, you could type
name = input("What's your name? ")
print (*hello,")
print (nane)
= The result in the terminal window would be
What's your name? David
hello
David
= We are getting closer to the result we might intend!
= You can learn more in Python's documentation on data types
https//docs python.org/3/library/datatypes.html).
Comments
= Comments are a way for programmers to track what they are doing in th
even inform others about their intentions for a block of code. In short, they are notes for
yourself and others who will see your code!
programs and
-ntp:ifes50.harvard.edufpythor/2022/notes/0! 33 511325, 2:15 PM Lecture 0 - 6850's Intodton to Programming wth Python
= You can add comments to your program to be able to see what it is that your program is
doing. You might edit your code as follows:
# Ask the user for their name
name = input("What's your name? ")
print(“hello,")
print (name)
= Comments can also serve as a to-do list for you.
Pseudocode
= Pseudocode is an important type of comment that becomes a special type of to-do list,
especially when you don't understand how to accomplish a coding task. For example, in
your code, you might edit your code to say:
# Ask the user for their name
name = input("What's your name? ")
# Print hello
print("hello,")
# Print the name inputted
print (name)
Further Improving Your First Python Program
| We can further edit our code as follows:
# Ask the user for their name
name = input ("What's your name? ")
# Print hello and the inputted name
print(“hello, “ + name)
= It turns out that some functions take many arguments.
= We can use a comma , to pass in multiple arguments by editing our code as follows:
# Ask the user for their name
ame = input ("What's your name? ")
# Print hello and the inputted name
print(“hello,", name)
The output in the terminal, if we typed "David" we would be hello, David . Success.
Strings and Parameters
= Astring, known as a str in Python, is a sequence of text.
-ntp:ifes50.harvard.edufpythor/2022/notes/0! ans 5119925, 915 PM Lecture 0 - CS50' nrodueton te Programming wth Python
= Rewinding a bit in our code back to the following, there was a visual side effect of having
the result appear on multiple lines:
# Ask the user for their name
name = input("What’s your name? ")
print(“hello,")
print (name)
® Functions take arguments that influence their behavior. If we look at the documentation
for print (https://docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html#print) you'll notice we can
learn a lot about the arguments that the print function takes.
® Looking at this documentation, you'll learn that the print function automatically includes
apiece of code end='\n'. This \n indicates that the print function will
automatically create a line break when run. The print function takes an
argunent called end’ and the default is to create a new line
= However, we can technically provide an argument for end ourselves such that a new line
is not created!
| We can modify our code as follows:
# Ask the user for their name
name = input("what's your name? ")
print("hello,", end
print (name)
By providing end="* we are overwriting the default value of end such that it never
creates a new Line after this first print statement. Providing the name as ‘David’, the
output in the terminal window will be hello, David
= Parameters, therefore, are arguments that can be taken bya function.
= You can learn more in Python's documentation on print
(https://docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html#print).
Asmall problem with quotation marks
= Notice how adding quotation marks as part of your string is challenging,
= print("hello, "friend"") will not work, and the interpreter will throw an error.
= Generally, there are two approaches to fixing this. First, you could simply change the
quotes to single quotation marks.
= Another, more commonly used approach would be code as print(“hello, \"friend\:
The backslashes tell the interpreter that the following character should be considered a
quotation mark in the string and avoid a interpreter error.
Formatting Strings
= Probably the most elegant way to use strings would be as follows:
Ditpsses0 harvard edulpython/2022/notes/O) 53 513126, 9:15 PM Lecture 0 - 6850's Introduction to Programming with Python
# Ask the user for their name
name = input("what’s your name? ")
print(f"hello, {name}")
Notice the f in print(fhello, {name}") .This f is a special indicator for Python to
treat this string a special way, different than previous approaches we have illustrated in
this lecture. Expect that you will be using this style of strings quite frequently in this
course.
More on Strings
= You should never expect your user to cooperate as intended. Therefore, you will need to
ensure that the input of your user is corrected or checked.
= It turns out that built into strings is the ability to remove whitespace from a string,
= By utilizing the method strip on name as name = name.strip() ,will strip all the
whitespaces on the left and right of the users input. You can modify your code to be:
# Ask the user for their name
name = input("what's your name?
# Remove whitespace from the str
name = name.strip()
# Print the output
print(f"hello, {name}")
Rerunning this program, regardless of how many spaces you type before or after the name,
it will strip off all the whitespace.
® Using the title method, it would title case the user's name:
# Ask the user for their name
name = input("What’s your name?
# Remove whitespace from the str
name = name.strip()
# Capitalize the first letter of each word
name = name.title()
# Print the output
print(f"hello, {name}"
= By this point, you might be very tired of typing python repeatedly in the terminal
window. You cause use the up arrow of your keyboard to recall the most recent terminal
commands you have made.
= Notice that you can modify your code to be more efficient:
# Ask the user for their name
name = input("What’s your name? “)
-ntpsifesS0.harvard.edufpythor/2022/notes/0! ens 571825, 215 PM Lecture 0 6850's Introduction te Programming wth Python
# Remove whitespace from the str and capitalize the first letter of each word
name = name.strip().title()
# Print the output
print(f"hello, {name}")
This creates the same result as your previous code.
© We could'even'go further! >
# Ask the user for their name, remove whitespace from the str and capitalize t
name = input("What's your name? “).strip().title()
# Print the output
print(f"hello, {name}")
—eeeeeeee
You can learn more about strings in Python's documentation on str.
Integers or int
= In Python, an integer is referred to as an int.
= In the world of mathematics, we are familiar with +,;",/, and % operators. That last
operator % or modulo operator may not be very familiar to you.
= You don't have to use the text editor window to run Python code. Down in your terminal,
you can run python alone, You will be presented with >>> in the terminal window. You
can then run live, interactive code. You could type 1+1 , and it will run that calculation.
This mode will not commonly be used during this course.
= Opening up VS Code again, we can type code calculator. py in the terminal. This will
create a new file in which we will create our own calculator.
= First, we can declare a few variables.
x=1
yr2
zexty
print(z)
Naturally, when we run python calculator.py we get the result in the terminal window
of 3.We can make this more interactive using the input function.
input ("what's x? ")
input ("what's y? ")
print(z)
-ntp:ifes50.harvard.edufpythor/2022/notes/0! 73 511325, 215 PM Lecture 0 - 6850's Intoduton to Programming wth Python
= Running this program, we discover that the output is incorrect as 12. Why might this be?
® Prior, we have seen how the + sign concatenates two strings. Because your input from
your keyboard on your computer comes into the interpreter as text, it is treated as a string.
We, therefore, need to convert this input from a string to an integer. We can do so as
follows:
x
input ("What's x?
y = input("what's y? ")
Z = int(x) + int(y)
print(z)
The result is now correct. The use of int(x) is called “casting,” where a value is
temporarily changed from one type of variable (in this case, a string) to another (here, an
integer).
= We can further improve our program as follows
y
int(input(“what's x? "))
int (input (“what's y?"))
print (x + y)
This illustrates that you can run functions on functions. The inner function is run first, and
then the outer one is run. First, the input function is run. Then, the int function.
|= You can learn more in Python's documentation of int
(nttps://docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html?highlight=float#int).
Readability Wins
= When deciding on your approach to a coding task, remember that one could make a
reasonable argument for many approaches to the same problem.
= Regardless of what approach you take to a programming task, remember that your code
must be readable. You should use comments to give yourself and others clues about what
your code is doing. Further, you should create code in a way that is readable.
Float Basics
® A floating point value is a real number that has a decimal point in it, such as 0.52.
= You can change your code to support floats as follows
x
y
float (input ("What's x? "))
float(input("What's y? "))
print(x + y)
-ntp:ifes50.harvard.edufpythor/2022/notes/0! ans 513125, 915 PM Lecture 0 - 6850's Introduction to Programming with Python
This change allows your user to enter 1.2 and 3.4 to presenta total of 4.6.
® Let's imagine, however, that you want to round the total to the nearest integer. Looking at,
the Python documentation for round , you'll see that the available arguments are
round(nunber[n, ndigits]) . Those square brackets indicate that something optional
can be specified by the programmer. Therefore, you could do round(n) to round a digit to
its nearest integer. Alternatively, you could code as follows:
# Get the user's input
float (input ("what's x? *))
float (input ("what's y? "))
# Create a rounded result
Z = round(x + y)
# Print the result
print (z)
The output will be rounded to the nearest integer.
= What if we wanted to format the output of long numbers? For example, rather than
seeing 1000 , you may wish to see 1,000 . You could modify your code as follows:
# Get the user's input
= float(input ("what's x? "))
y = float(input("what's y? "))
# Create a rounded result
Z = round(x + y)
# Print the formatted result
print (f"{z:,}")
Though quite cryptic, that print(#"{z:,}") creates a scenario where the outputted z
will include commas where the result could look like 1,000 or 2,500.
More on Floats
= How can we round floating point values? First, modify your code as follows:
# Get the user's input
float (input("what's x? "))
float (input ("What's y? "))
# Calculate the result
zex/y
# Print the result
print(z)
When inputting 2 as x and 3 asy, the result zis 0.6666666666 , seemingly going on to
infinite as we might expect.
|= Let's imagine that we want to round this down. We could modify our code as follows:
-ntp:ifes50.harvard.edufpythor/2022/notes/0! ons 513126, 9:15 PM Lecture 0 - 6850's Introduction to Programming with Python
# Get the user's input
float (input ("what's x? "))
float(input(*what's y? “))
