Helper Functions

A helper function performs part of the computation of another function. It allows you to reuse common code without repeating ourselves. For instance, suppose you had a few lines of code that printed out the elapsed time at various points in a function:

import time
def do_things():
    start_time = time.perf_counter()
    for i in range(10):
        y = i ** 100
        print(time.perf_counter() - start_time, "seconds elapsed")
    x = 10**2
    print(time.perf_counter() - start_time, "seconds elapsed")
    return x
   
do_things()

You should get the following output:

Figure 3.29: Timing our helper functions

The print statement is repeated twice in the preceding code, and will be better expressed as a helper function, as follows...