Skip to main content

First Project (First Iteration)

NOTE: Major error in the dictionary -- plural forms identified as singular.  (12/30/17, 8:10 PM)

This is the first version of my first project.  The overall goal would be to create a fully functional application that can parse any Latin verb the user enters.  This represents my first baby steps towards that goal.  Here is the code:
stems = {
"o" : "first person singular",
"as" : "second person singular",
"at" : "third person singular",
"amus" : "first person singular",
"atis" : "second person singular",
"ant" : "third person singular",
def parse(verb):
    stem = verb[len("am"):]
    try:
        return(stems[stem])
    except:
        print("Verb form not found.") 
while True:
    entry = input("Enter a Latin verb: ")
    if parse(entry) != None:
        print(parse(entry))
Right now, the parser has pretty severe limitations.  It will only parse singular present active indicative forms of the verb "amo".  I've set up a dictionary to recognize all of those forms.

The main idea for the app is to take the user entry, split it into root and stem, then search for the entry corresponding to that stem in the dictionary.  One question for the final form would be whether I would want to make the dictionary sensitive to different roots or just focus on stems.  Probably if the app can just find the stem, it doesn't have to know anything about the root.  If it finds no stem, it will return an error.

Since there are several forms of conjugation in Latin (e.g. first conjugation, second conjugation), I might want to consider whether to have separate dictionary for each conjugation, where the app is able to determine which conjugation to look in.

Sometimes the conjugation is ambiguous -- in that case, I would want to be able to program the app to print all relevant entries.

How does the app work right now?  First, the user enters something, hopefully a form of the verb "amo."  The app calls a function, parse(), using the entry as its argument.  It pretty much assumes that it is looking for the stem of the verb "amo" -- I did this by having it define stem as everything from the end of that root (from string position 3, in other words).  It then uses stem as a key to look up the verb form in the dictionary.  If it finds the verb form, it returns the entry -- otherwise, it alerts the user that nothing was found.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Getting Geodata From Google's API

The apps I'm going to be analyzing are part of Dr. Charles Severance's MOOC on Python and Databases and work together according to the following structure (which applies both in this specific case and more generally to any application that creates and interprets a database using online data). The data source, in this case, is Google's Google Maps Geocoding API.  The "package" has two components: geoload.py  and geodump.py .  geoload.py  reads a list of locations from a file -- addresses for which we would like geographical information -- requests information about them from Google, and stores the information on a database ( geodata.db ).  geodump.py  reads and parses data from the database in JSON, then loads that into a javascript file.  The javascript is then used to create a web page on which the data is visualized as a series of points on the world-map.  Dr. Severance's course focuses on Python, so I'm only going to work my way through ...

The Jump Algorithm

Meetup Went to a Coding Whiteboard Meetup tonight.  It was pretty great.  One of the leaders was even a CS master's student.  At first, honestly, I felt a little bit frustrated, especially because everyone around me seemed to be using pretty high level concepts / approaches that I wasn't familiar with.  But I found someone and relentlessly talked him through his approach until we both kind of realized there were issues in the problem we hadn't worked out yet.  I guess it just reinforces my feeling that when something seems too difficult, if you can, you need to find someone and force him to explain it to you in terms you can understand.  If the people around you really understand what they're about, they will have no problem and you'll learn a lot (assuming they're patient, I guess).  If they don't, you'll realize you aren't as alone as you thought you were.  Bit of the old Socrates. Problem So imagine you have an array with a bunch of numbe...

Shell Sort

Today I spent a little bit of time researching the "Shell" sort.  I wanted to post a few notes about the Princeton Algorithms Course's implementation to help me solidify my understanding. First, a little tidbit.  When I first heard about this algorithm, I thought it had something to do with shell games.  Turns out a man named Donald Shell discovered this method of sorting, whence the name. The Algorithms  book gives the following explanation (Sedgewick and Wayne,  Algorithms, 4th ed., p. 258): The idea is to rearrange the array to give it the property that taking every hth entry (starting anywhere) yields a sorted subsequence. Such an array is said to be h-sorted. Put another way, an h-sorted array is h independent sorted subsequences, interleaved together. By h-sorting for some large values of h, we can move items in the array long distances and thus make it easier to h-sort for smaller values of h. Using such a procedure for any sequence of values o...