Matt

Matt is a free software (licensed under the GNU GPL v3 (or later)) maths test program. "Matt" (or "MATT") is a recursive acronym for "MATT Arithmetic Training Test".

Installation

Matt depends on:

• termcolor

• pyxdg

• colorama (windows only)

There are 2 methods of installation: via poetry and via pip:

Installation via poetry

Poetry should handle the installation of dependencies. To install, first clone the git repository, then run:

poetry install

Installation via pip

Pip should handle the installation of dependencies. To install, run:

python3 -m pip install matt

Usage

Run python3 -m matt -h for help. Matt accepts the following arguments:

• --difficulty or -d to set the difficulty (in the format "<namespace>:<number>"). The default namespace is reserved for the default difficulties. If unspecified the default is default:1.

• --operations or -o to set the available operations. Operations are separated by commas, the available operations are:

  • +: Addition
  • -: Subtraction
  • *: Multiplication
  • /: Division

  One can also use custom operators defined in the configuration.

  Example: -o +,- to enable only addition and subtraction.

• --minimum or -m to set the minumum, default (if not specified in difficulty): 0.

• --maximum or -M to set the maximum, default (if not specified in difficulty): 10.

• --question-amount or -q to set the amount of questions, the default is 10.

NOTE: The maximum must be more than the minimum.

Config

Matt has a configuration file, it is written in Python, and located at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/matt/config.py. By default $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is set to ~/.config, so if you have not set it then it is probably ~/.config/matt/config.py.

The configuration can define custom difficulties and custom operations.

Matt's builtin difficulties/operations are defined in matt/defaults.py, and they are defined in the same way as custom ones so you can look there for further examples and details on Matt's defaults.

Defining custom difficulties

The configuration can provide a difficulty function that accepts 2 parameters:

• namespace (str): The namespace of the difficulty.

• number (int): The number of the difficulty.

The difficulty function must return a dict or None (although if it simply returns None then it is useless).

The dict can have the following keys:

• minimum (int): the minimum number

• maximum (int): the maximum number

• operations (a list of strs (typing.List[str])): a list of allowed operations

A simple example is:

from typing import Union
def difficulty(namespace: str, number: int) -> Union[dict, None]:
 if namespace == "manual":
 if number == 1:
 return {
 "operations": ["+", "-"],
 "maximum": 20,
 "minimum": 10
 }
 return None

It is also possible to create a dynamic maximum, like the following example, which creates a difficulty called "automatic", whose maximum is the number * 10:

from typing import Union
def difficulty(namespace: str, number: int) -> Union[dict, None]:
 if namespace == "automatic":
 return {
 "operations": ["+", "-", "*", "/"],
 "maximum": number * 10
 }
 return None

Defining custom operations

The configuration can provide a operations dict to define custom operations. The keys are the names of the operations, and the values are dicts which can contain the following keys:

• format (function): a function which takes 2 numbers and returns a str. The str is usually a string which contains both values and the operation, it is used to ask the user about the answer. Unless format_full_override or format_colour_override are set to True, it is sent to the user prepended with What is , and appended with ? . an example of a function used for format is (this example would be for the + operation):

lambda n1, n2: f"{n1} + {n2}"

If this is not set then the default is <n1> <operation> <n2>.

• function (function): a function which takes 2 numbers, and returns the correct answer for those 2 numbers. This must be defined. Example (for a strange operation that is the result of addition - 1):

lambda n1, n2: n1 + n2 - 1

• format_full_override (bool): if this is True then What is /? are not added to the string.

• format_colour_override (bool): if this is True then the string is not coloured.

An example which defines an operation called ! that is the result of addition -1, and an operation called ++ that is the same as addition but just gives the user the answer:

from operator import add
operations: dict = {
 "!": {
 "function": lambda n1, n2: n1 + n2 - 1
 },
 "++": {
 "function": add,
 "format": lambda n1, n2: f"Type {n1 + n2}! ",
 "format_full_override": True
 }
}