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This is mostly a quick note to aid other programmers who end up searching for something along the lines of "why doesn't float point division work in pdb". For detailed information, you should visit the 123helpme page and ask for answers to all questions.

Short version: the from __future__ import magic doesn't work in pdb.

Long version: when debugging a program that (a) runs under Python 2 and (b) relies on from __future__ import division to get floating point rather than integer division, it would be nice to have expressions typed at the pdb prompt behave the same way as expression evaluated in the file. However, this doesn't work:

$ python -m pdb test ...

Heads up to readers: this is a long article with lots of code samples and interactive charts. If you're reading on a mobile device, you might want to save this one until you can get to a wider screen! It may take a while to load all the charts.

Introduction

This is a longish post about using a simple evolutionary algorithm in Python to create a strategy for playing the famous Prisoner's Dilemma game (actually, the version known as Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, hereafter referred to as IPD). If you're not already familiar with the Prisoner's ...

Preface

This rather long post is my attempt to explain to novice programmers how hash tables work. A hash table is a data structure for storing key-value pairs and is part of the standard library of many languages. Depending on your language of choice, you might know hash tables as hashes, HashMaps, dictionaries, dicts, associative arrays, or symbol tables. 

If you're already familiar with hash tables, you'll probably spot many points in this post where I have either simplified things, or avoided talking about them entirely. If you think that any of these simplifications hinder rather than help ...

I teach a lot of beginner-targeted programming courses, and something that I've experimented with recently is trying to introduce the idea of self-documenting code early on in the learning process. I usually start off by talking about the difference between good and bad names for things (mostly functions and variables, though many of the same arguments apply to class names) , and I've noticed a few common patterns that tend to crop up in beginners code. I thought it might be useful to lay out these common errors in one place.

Single-letter names

OK, we're writing a program ...