November 12, 2009 · homework

Several people have asked some questions about homework 10 which I would like to address

On named parameters to mean_sent_len and mean_word_len functions. We had previously defined these functions to ignore stop words. That is when computing the mean number of words per sentence, throw out stop words before calculating the mean. We might not want to this all the time though. So now we make this an option to the function. Like all other named arguments to functions, they have a default value. In this case, we want the default to be true.

For question 3, remember that when using the timeit module, you have to import all necessary modules in your setup statement. If you like, this can be a multiline string (it’s easier to read that way). Also note that question 3 has nothing to do with question 4.

Note that for question 4, I am asking you to add a global option, i.e. one that you could specify when calling your script from the command line. This has nothing to do with question 3 at all.

Note that my sample output had an error. I accidentally output the percentage of non-stopwords, as opposed to the percentage of stopwords. Sorry about that, and thanks to Steve for pointing it out.

Finally, as to the strange naming of include-stopwords, consider trying it the other way around, using ignore_stopwords. If this is true by default, (which is what we want), then how do you make it false from the command line? You could make it have an argument, so you would say

./hmwk10.py --ignore_stopwords=false 

but I don’t like that. I would rather specify

./hmwk10.py --include_stopwords

and have the default for –include_stopwords be false.

Written by Robert Felty


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