Gizmosmith

Counting Instances of Things

This is something I seem to do a lot. Most recently, I was trying to see how many nodes of each degree there were in a graph, but it could also be used for word counts and such.

#Run through a list and count occurrences of each item,
#store them in a dictionary of items to counts
def bin(list):
    bins = {}
    for item in list:
        if item in bins.keys():
            bins[item] += 1
        else:
            bins[item] = 1
    return bins

The key thing here is not really the little bit of python glue code to do the counting. What is key is to learn to recognize things that you do more than once, and automate them. A folkloric axiom of computer programming is that you need to do something either exactly once, or an unknown number of times. If you have to do it once, then the program should do it once. If it’s the other case, then the program should determine how often to do it, and then do it.

For example, if the program trims the whitespace off the end of a text file, it should either do it once (which allows the user to call it in a shell script loop if they want to process any number of files), or do it to any number of files. The alternative, having it process some arbitrary number of files and then fail, has two problems. First, it adds complexity. The program now has to keep a counter, check it, and fail when it hits a certain value. Second, the program, which previously worked in an infinite number of cases (that is, it would process N files for all N such that N is a positive integer), now has an infinite number of failure cases (fail for all integers greater than M), and has gone from complete success to complete failure, via the most difficult route.