Robert G. Brown wrote:
On Mon, 19 Mar 2007, Joe Landman wrote:
ps disclosure: FWIW I do play the occasional Perl golf. Last one I
played with was to write a roman numeral calculator (c.f.
http://www.fonality.com/golf/ and
http://www.fonality.com/golf/post_mortem.cgi?id=1).
Just for grins I did this too (and thanks for nothing -- gawds, all I
need is another mindless programming task:-)
Heh... Well last I checked I was #53 or so on there. 350 characters for
a roman numeral calculator. After it was over, I learned how to shave
20-30 characters off.
Not that this is a useful skill or anything like that, but it was a
challenge.
Sort of like Sudoku. Or the chess Queens problem.
The only problem I have with it is the "least number of keystrokes"
thing. I personally think that this part at the very least needs to be
"in the active subroutine, exclusive of debugging code" to eliminate the
trivial overhead of getting the number in from the command line or
whereever and various good-practice things like comments, indentation,
newlines.
Actually I think minimal number of keystrokes is not necessarily the
right way to do things. Having programmed in APL ages ago, I can tell
you that some abstractions are better left untouched ...
The other problem I have with the challenge is that a) the test strings
are all trivial and are far from exhaustive of the available test space;
This is curiously what separates the approaches. The most common short
approach is to avoid doing conversions, but to run a loop over the
indices 1 to 3999 and generate roman numerals from that. Then when
there is a match, use that in the calculation. Saves having to do a
forward/backwards conversion. Wasteful on memory/time. But sure saves
on keystrokes. Also, I cannot for the life of me mentally parse some of
those "programs".
b) the routine doesn't have to REJECT strings that are technically
invalid (or at least odd) since the "roman numeral algorithm" isn't
single valued without additional restriction. For example,
XLII = 42 = VIIIL = XXXXII?
(Note well that the answer in all cases, curiously enough, is "42",
hmmmm:-)
Yeah ... but whats the question ...
--
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
web : http://www.scalableinformatics.com
phone: +1 734 786 8423
fax : +1 734 786 8452 or +1 866 888 3112
cell : +1 734 612 4615
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