Batching

So far in these exercises, you've mainly implemented one function per exercise. You'll reap even bigger benefits from writing your code in functions once your programs grow large and complex enough to contain multiple functions. In preparation for that, we want to introduce a useful form of documentation: the docstring.

A Python function docstring is a comment string, conventially encased in triple quotes, on the first line after the def statement of a function. The docstring describes the input(s) and output of the function. Someone reading your code should be able to figure out a function's behavior just by reading its docstring, without examining your code. You should write docstrings for any functions which you expect to reuse or share with others.

To illustrate the value of a docstring, for this problem, we've described the function you should implement via the docstring below.

First read the docstring below, but we also provide a few examples:¹:

• batch((13, 2, 3, 4, 3, 1, 1, 1, 4, 2, 3), 5) returns [[13], [2, 3], [4, 3], [1, 1, 1, 4], [2, 3]]

• batch((6, 7, 6, 8, 6), 7) returns [[6, 7], [6, 8], [6]]

• batch((4, 4), 4) returns [[4], [4]]

To check your understanding, after reading through the docstring, please answer this checker. To clarify, we make the batch by adding in elements from the input tuple until the batch reaches the size amount. Then we stop that batch and begin the next one. If this is confusing, please take a look at the answer and explanation after getting a 100% on the checker.

What should be the returned value of the call batch((1, 8, 3, 4, 3, 2, 4), 8)

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def batch(inp, size): """ Inputs: inp is a tuple of non-negative integers. size is a non-negative integer. Outputs: Returns a list of batches, where each batch is a list of elements from "inp" (in the same order as from "inp"), with just enough elements to fill the batch. A batch is filled when the sum of the values of the elements in the batch is greater than or equal to "size," or when there are no more elements from "inp" to put in the batch. """ pass #replace with your code

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