Lecture 11 — Exercises

Solutions to the problems below must be sent to Submitty for grading. A separate file must submitted for each problem. Solutions must be submitted by 4 pm on Wednesday, October 12.

  1. Suppose you have a tuple that stores the semester and year a course was taken, as in

    when = ('Spring',2015)
    

    Write a function called earlier_semester() that takes two such tuples as arguments and returns True if the first tuple represents an earlier semester and False otherwise. The possible semesters are 'Spring' and 'Fall'. (Just to be clear, Fall 2013 is later than Spring 2013.) Test it using the following main code (you can cut-and-paste from the browser), which should be your only print function calls.

    # Insert your function def here...
    
    w1 = ('Spring',2015)
    w2 = ('Spring',2014)
    w3 = ('Fall', 2014)
    w4 = ('Fall', 2015)
    print( "{} earlier than {}? {}".format( w1, w2, earlier_semester(w1,w2)))
    print( "{} earlier than {}? {}".format( w1, w1, earlier_semester(w1,w1)))
    print( "{} earlier than {}? {}".format( w1, w4, earlier_semester(w1,w4)))
    print( "{} earlier than {}? {}".format( w4, w1, earlier_semester(w4,w1)))
    print( "{} earlier than {}? {}".format( w3, w4, earlier_semester(w3,w4)))
    print( "{} earlier than {}? {}".format( w1, w3, earlier_semester(w3,w2)))
    
  2. Suppose three siblings, Dale, Erin and Sam, have heights hd, he and hs, respectively. Write a program that reads in integer values of their heights and outputs the ordering from tallest to shortest. (For simplicity of this exercises, you may assume that the three heights you will be given are all different.) Try writing your solution using nested if statements and trying writing it without nested if statements; either is acceptable on Submitty and trying both is good practice. Here is an example as the code would look on Submitty.

    Enter Dale's height: 124
    Enter Erin's height: 112
    Enter Sam's height: 119
    Dale
    Sam
    Erin