After mastering loops, Alex was curious about functions in Python. They had heard that functions were a powerful tool for organizing code and making it more reusable.
To better understand functions, Alex decided to create a simple program that would calculate the area of a rectangle. They began by writing a simple formula to calculate the area:
# Formula for calculating the area of a rectangle
# Author: Alex
# Date: 2/25/2023
width = 5
height = 10
area = width * height
print("The area of the rectangle is:", area)
In this code, Alex manually calculated the area of a rectangle using a fixed width and height. However, they realized that this code would not be very useful if they wanted to calculate the area of a rectangle with different dimensions.
To solve this problem, Alex decided to write a function that would calculate the area of a rectangle given its width and height as input parameters. They began by defining the function using the def keyword:
# Function for calculating the area of a rectangle
# Author: Alex
# Date: 2/25/2023
def calculate_area(width, height):
area = width * height
return area
In this code, Alex defined a function called calculate_area that takes two input parameters, width and height, and calculates the area of a rectangle using the formula width * height. The function then returns the calculated area.
Alex was excited to see their new function in action. They called the function with different input parameters to calculate the area of rectangles with different dimensions:
# Program to calculate the area of rectangles
# Author: Alex
# Date: 2/25/2023
# Defining the calculate_area function
def calculate_area(width, height):
area = width * height
return area
# Calculating the area of a rectangle with width 5 and height 10
area1 = calculate_area(5, 10)
print("The area of the rectangle is:", area1)
# Calculating the area of a rectangle with width 3 and height 7
area2 = calculate_area(3, 7)
print("The area of the rectangle is:", area2)
In this code, Alex defined the calculate_area function and then called it twice with different input parameters. The program printed the area of each rectangle using the values returned by the function.
Alex was impressed by how easy it was to define and call functions in Python. They realized that functions were a powerful tool for organizing code and making it more reusable, and that they could be used to solve a variety of programming problems.
