References

This homework is based on our current unit on classes, focusing on operator overloading and Python’s “magic methods”.

This chapter from the “Python in a Nutshell” book talks about a number of these special methods and gives a good overview.

The ultimate reference is this page from the Python official documentation.

Your task

Create a file point.py that contains a class you write called Point to represent a 2-D coordinate with x and y.

Here’s how I will test your code:

from point import Point

p1 = Point(3,4)
p2 = Point(5,0)
print(p1)       # displays "(3,4)"
p3 = p1 + p2
print(p3)       # displays "(8,4)"
print(p1)       # still "(3,4)"
print(p2/2)     # displays "(2.5,0.0)"
midpoint = (p1 + p2) / 2
print(midpoint) # displays "(4.0,2.0)"

Running this file should produce the following output:

(3,4)
(8,4)
(3,4)
(2.5,0.0)
(4.0,2.0)

In order for this to work correctly, you will need to write these methods in your Point class:

• __init__: Create a new Point from x and y coordinates
• __add__: Add two Points to create a new Point
• __truediv__: Divide a Point by a number to “scale” that Point by the number
• __str__: Convert a Point to a string formatted like (XVALUE,YVALUE)

(Note: if you write any testing code inside your point.py file, make sure you put it under a if __name__ == '__main__' check.)

Submit command

To submit files for this homework, run one of these commands:

submit -c=sd212 -p=hw28 point.py
club -csd212 -phw28 point.py