Old Man Learns to Code

For reasons not apparent to my conscious self, I felt a pressing need to break off from my Xpander project ( here ) and retreat to the comfort of generating a bunch of Obsidian notes and of "relaxing" and reading a bunch of Reddit posts. Doing this, of course, raises the red flag of me engaging in a Dopamine-driven avoidance of the hard tasks. It reinforces my counter-productive habit of constantly retreating to the comfort of mindless collecting and hoarding of bookmark conten t . [ specific e.g. here ]  ... Come to think of it as an aside here, I think I found an answer to how to organize my Blogger bookmarks. The answer is to work backwards ! First locate the titles of my posts here on Blogger and then, using those; create folders in my weekly bookmark saves with the same names. For example, create a "Brain Boosters" folder under my "Learning" [about Lea r ning] major-tab, create an "Every __ explained" folder under my "Other Sw" maj...

In my previous post ( here ), I concluded that I was heading down the wrong solution path with my Abbreviations* "Xpander" code. [* = Actually abbreviations plus scripts & url's] Now I take it back. Well, at least partially.  I was wrong about being wrong. Two wrongs do make a write -- meaning, something to write about. The two oopsies could operate as a double hit on my fragile ego (a.k.a. my Dunning-Kruger  based confidence about always being right, about my brain's concocted models of the universe and them being 101% correct despite my lack of full knowledge of the universe ). One reason I was wrong in this particular case (wrong about being totally wrong) is because my initial "thought experiment(s)" did  provide useful insights . I now more clearly understand what problems I'm facing in coding up the Xpander project. link for image source is ( here ),  more of Bob's Banter ( here ) and also ( here ) about staying motivated Some additional in...

  It's time to get down to the " nitty gritties ." The grandiose planning and scheming for the Xpander project [ here ] is done for now. So next I've got to break down the code into smaller pieces and figure out how to do the logic properly. First up is the analyzer for the input text. I've got to consider edge cases as well as the assumed general case. [Note to myself: Use r"/'''"  strings in the dictionaries! QABg ::: python r strings ] [G4G re r strings here ] [OTHER prefixed strings here !!] [Music for reading below boring stuff with is here ] Some of the possible permutations for the input text variable include: (0) An empty text string; (1) Only 1 character          (1a) A received lone char is a P3 or a P4 (no pre-fixed char)                     --what to do? (2) Only 2 characters:          (2a) Second one is a P3 or a P4 while first is not = a valid Abv ...

  I only vaguely remember how my so-called "second" project for learning OOP evolved into my current "Xpander" project . I sure am glad though, that I found justification for doing it as an OOP project based on the idea that I will need different instances (a.k.a. different lookup dictionaries) for different situations  (a.k.a. different " contexts " ) . [QAAA =  ( Query Asked And Answered ) =  QA3 -->  here  and here ] In other words, (Abv = iow ?)   thank goodness I'm developing it as an OOP project. The project is too complex to not be an OOP project. [QA3 = here ]   ( Link to first image on the right is here ) Let me "step back" in time a bit. I used to write work-related macros in VBA for MS Word. My two most useful, hot key activated, macros were called "DoThis" and "ConvertThis" ( made up names here ). For the first macro, I would highlight a text string that was the name of yet another VBA macro and hit a hot ...