Refactoring

One of my laments on teaching computer science is that students are rarely taught and given the chance to develop good programming practices. There's usually not enough time. Beginners work on small "toys" which don't lend themselves to good software development practices and later on, there's so much other material like algorithms, data structures etc. to teach and learn that programming practices usually amount to lines like:

"Make sure to comment your code.."

"Indent properly…"

"Use functions…"

"It's important to test your code…"

so when I see an opportunity to use a simple example to drive home a good practice, I try to jump on it.

Drawing shapes with text is a typical early project. I've seen it in text books and online and have been doing it for years. I recall doing it back in the 80s in Fortran IV when the programs we wrote were on punch cards, run overnight on an IBM 1130, and printouts picked up the next day.

It's a nice use of nested loops. The students will write functions to create assorted shapes out of asterisks like rectangles and triangles. Typical solutions look like this:

#include <iostream>


std::string box(int h, int w){
std::string r = "";
  for (int i = 0; i < h; ++i) {
    for (int j = 0; j < w; j++) {
      r = r + "*";
    }
    r = r + "\n";
  }
  return r;
}


std::string tri(int h){
std::string r = "";
  for (int i = 0; i < h; ++i) {
    for (int j = 0; j < i; j++) {
      r = r + "*";
    }
    r = r + "\n";
  }
  return r;
}

Which results in shapes like these:

| ****            |    | *               |
| ****            |    | **              |
| ****            |    | ***             |
| ****            |    | ****            |
| ****            |    |                 |
|                 |    |                 |
|                 |    |                 |
| *************** |    | *               |
| *************** |    | **              |
| *************** |    | ***             |
| *************** |    | ****            |
| *************** |    | *****           |
| *************** |    | ******          |
| *************** |    | *******         |

Then there will be more interesting shapes including things like:

   *       *            *****
  **      ***           *   *            and more
 ***     *****          *   *
****      ***           *****
           *   

This is a great time to talk about refactoring. All of the shape drawing functions follow the same pattern - there's an outer loop for the height and then one or more inner loops to draw each line. We can factor out the inner loops in to a separate line() function.

#include <iostream>


std::string box(int h, int w){
  std::string r = "";
  for (int i = 0; i < h; ++i) {
    for (int j = 0; j < w; j++) {     //
      r = r + "*";                    // <----- This can be factored out
    }                                 //
    r = r + "\n";
  }
  return r;
}


std::string tri(int h){
  std::string r = "";
  for (int i = 0; i < h; ++i) {
    for (int j = 0; j < i; j++) {    //
      r = r + "*";                   // <---------------- along with this
    }                               //
    r = r + "\n";
  }
  return r;
}

It's just like factoring in algebra:

We end up with:

#include <iostream>

std::string line(int w, std::string c){
  std::string r = "";
  for (int i = 0; i < w; ++i) {
    r = r + c;
  }
  return r;
}

std::string box(int h, int w){
  std::string r = "";
  for (int i = 0; i < h; ++i) {
    r = r + line(w,"*") + "\n";
  }
  return r;
}


std::string tri(int h){
  std::string r = "";
  for (int i = 0; i < h; ++i) {
    r = r + line(i,"*") + "\n";
  }
  return r;
}

It's simpler, cleaner, and also can lead us to thinking about the "harder" shapes in an interesting way. Instead of looking at the right justified triangle as a triangle, we can think of each level as two lines - one of spaces (shown here as dashes) followed by a line of stars:

----*       *
---**      **
--***     ***
-****    ****
*****   *****

Noticing that for a height of 5, the dashed lines count down in length 4,3,2,1,0 and the star lines count up 1,2,3,4,5, we get:

std::string tri2(int h){
  std::string r = "";
  for (int i = 0; i < h; ++i) {
    r = r + line(h-i-1,"-") + line(i+1,"*") + "\n";
  }
  return r;
}

int main()
{
  std::string r = tri2(5);
  std::cout << r << std::endl;
  return 0;
}

Here we have typical early CS assignment that really lends itself to talking about structuring programs and refactoring. Where else can we inject good programming practices in ways that make sense early on?