Since I have little
idea about 'non-object-oriented programming', if there is one, I cannot really fully
understand what's special for object-oriented programming and under what
circumstances it will be used.
Using my intuition
and the knowledge that I possess so far, I think object-oriented programming is
a type of programming language that has something to do with objects. For
example, every line of code we wrote contains one or more objects, like
strings, lists, numbers, dictionaries, tuples, and even new classes created by
ourselves. And we can use object-oriented programming languages such as Python
to create some functions or methods to solve problems containing objects.
This week, I learned
several concepts in class, like raising an exception and creating a new class
called Stack. The class Stack have many functions. For instance, it can store
some values in a list as well as removing values from the list. In the lecture,
we also came up with a way to create the Stack object correctly even when we
type s = Stack([1, 2, 3]) whereas s = Stack() is how we originally create the
class Stack.
I think week 3's
lab was fun, especially the efficiency improvement part. At the beginning, my
codes needed more than 4 seconds to run the most complex test. After I improved
my codes with the help of TA, I could run the test only in 0.2 second (or 0.02...I
forgot). When I achieved that after spending 40 minutes of thinking, I was
really happy. The way I did was to add a new variable in the __init__ method to
keep tracing the time that the method dequeue() is called. So every time the
dequeue method is called, the object at the index that is traced will be
returned instead of using pop at the beginning. This method can increase the
run time of the program a lot shorter.
