Homework 1

The purpose of this homework is to get further practice with user input, if statements, and loops – basically, to put together everything you have learned so far.

On this homework, the problems will be relatively short, but there are many of them, because early on in learning programming (or any new language) doing small projects to reinforce the concepts is helpful.

Note that questions 1-8 are programming assignments with expected input and output that the autograder will give you feedbakc for. Question 9 is also a programming assignment, but is more open-ended and will not be autograded.

For Proficiency credit:

Your code should pass all the test cases on Gradescope
Your code for question 8 should do what you describe that it does

For Mastery credit:

Everything for proficiency, plus

Your code should be well-organized with good and informative variable names
Your code should have consistent spacing

Submission Instructions

To make your life, and my life, easier, there are a few submission instructions you should follow to submit your homework to gradescope.

Each problem has its own assignment on gradescope. Be sure to submit question 1 to HWK1: Q1, and question 2 to HWK2: Q2, and so on.
Every submission should be named with the question number and the letter q. For example, for question 3, the file should be called q3.py.
Follow the requested print statements exactly. The autograder is not very intelligent; it just gives input and asks for expected output. I will be reading and giving feedback on your code as a human, but to give you the opportunity to see whether your code is working, the autograder gives feedback too.

Some general reminders:

Make sure to save your code before running it, and before submitting it.
If you are having problems, start small and build. Is there any piece of the problem you think you could do, even if it is just “read a number”? Is there a second piece you can do, like “read a number and add to it”?

Questions

Q1

Write a program that takes a number from the command line and outputs the string "even" if the number is even, and "odd" if the number is odd. No text prompt for the number is needed.

Example:

> 9
odd

Q2

Write a program that takes two numbers from the command line and outputs the larger number with the label Larger: . If the numbers are equal, output Equal with no number.

Example 1:

> 9
> 3
Larger: 9

Example 2:

> 2
>  2
Equal

Q3

Write a program that takes in two strings and prints them in alphabetical order separated by a comma. Hint: Python’s < operator can compare strings too.

Example:

> banana
> apple
apple,banana

Q4

Write a program that takes in 3 numbers and outputs them in sorted order, separated by spaces.

Example:

Q5

Write a program that simply prints the word “beans” five times, using a while loop.

Example:

beans
beans
beans
beans
beans

Q6

Write a program that does the same as the above, but use a for loop.

Q7

Write a program that takes in two numbers and counts down from the first number by the second number until you reach 0. Do not print any numbers less than or equal to 0.

Example 1:

Example 2:

Q8

Write a program that takes in two numbers and prints every number between them (inclusive) separated by commas.

Note: The program should print from smallest to largest, regardless of which was entered first.

Example 1:

> 2
> 9
2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9

Example 2:

> 20
> 17
17,18,19,20

Q9

For question 9, write your own question. Come up with some small program that uses a while or for loop to perform some simple task like the ones listed above. It can be very simple. The only requirements are:

There should be a comment near the top of the file that describes what the file is intended to do
The code should use a loop

Example file (you can’t use this one!):

# this program prints out all the even numbers between 20 and 40
i = 20
while i < 40:
    print(i)
    i += 2