Logistics

This is a lab assignment and so you will not be submitting it. However, the concepts and practice will help you on both the homework and exams so I encourage you to make a serious effort on it during class and consider finishing it outside of class.

I recommend making a folder for today’s lab in COURSES as you usually do.

Exercise 0

(This is a repeat from the start of class.) This lab has you try writing many recursive functions. This is a really tricky concept, and you’ll probably need lots of practice to start getting comfortable with it. PythonTutor is your friend for understanding what is going on with your functions!

For this exercise, write a recursive function called power(b, n) that returns b raised to the nth power. You can assume that they are both non-negative integers. (You should not use Python’s ** functionality for this one.)

If you get stuck, walk through this solution on PythonTutor.

Exercise 1

Write a recursive function called countdown(n) that takes a positive integer n and prints out each value from n to 0, decreasing by 1 at each step, printing each value on its own line. (Note: this function asks you to print values, not return them. What, if anything, needs to be returned in that case?)

Exercise 2

Write a recursive function called fib(n) that returns the nth Fibonacci number. For the record, the first and second Fibonacci numbers are defined to be 0 and 1, respectively. After that, the nth Fibonacci number is defined as the sum of the two Fibonacci numbers that precede it. For example, the sequence begins 0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13…

Exercise 3

Write a recursive function called countVal(val, lst) that returns a count representing the number of times that the value val is present in the list lst.

Exercise 4

Write a recursive function called countup(n) that takes a positive integer n and prints out each value from 0 to n, increasing by 1 at each step, printing each value on its own line.

Exercise 5

Write a recursive function called getMin(lst) that returns the minimum element from a given list of integers.

Exercise 6

Write a modified version of the recursive Fibonacci function from Problem 2 above, and call it countFib(n). This function should return a list with two items (or a tuple if you prefer) containing a) the nth Fibonacci number and b) the number of times countFib() is called. The easiest approach will be to modify the fib(n) from above.

Exercise 7

Write a recursive function called mod(a, b) that computes the remainder we get when we divide a by b. This is precisely what the % operator does in Python, but your function should instead use recursion to compute this remainder.

Extra

Write a recursive that will generate all the anagrams (rearrangements of the letters) of a string. For example, all the anagrams of the string abca are ['abca', 'abac', 'acba', 'acab', 'aabc', 'aacb', 'baca', 'baac', 'bcaa', 'bcaa', 'baca', 'baac', 'caba', 'caab', 'cbaa', 'cbaa', 'caba', 'caab', 'abca', 'abac', 'acba', 'acab', 'aabc', 'aacb'].

This is a tricky problem! I recommend you take the following approach:

  1. What is your base case? What string has the simplest list of anagrams?
  2. If the string is longer than your base case: a. For each character in that string: i. Create a copy of the string with the character removed (you can do this with string.replace(letter, "", 1) to replace letter with the empty string one time) ii. Generate all the anagrams of the remaining letters with a recursive call iii. For each of those generated anagrams, attach the removed character to the front of the anagram