Friday Programming Quiz

[Tomas Petricek]

I think part of the scariness is the VB syntax for queries. VB queries contain almost anything you may ever need (I was quite suprised when I tried it :-)). That's the VB style of doing things - it makes programming easier, but you can easily write really ugly and inefficient code. The C# queries are slightly better (they don't direcly support 'Skip' and 'Take'), but in general the simplicity still hides a lot from what is actually going on. I think that when the same thing is written using the new language features (general purpose features, so no queries!), it doesn't look that scary. It will be a bit longer though (I'm switching back to C#, since I'm not sure how VB does anonymous functions - though I expect that it will be uglier than in C#):

// It would look roughly like this..
args.Select(a => Int32.Parse(a).SortBy(a => a).Skip((args.Length - 5) / 2).Take(5)

Using this syntax it is much easier to see what the code actually does - It's sill not perfect, but it's probably the best that can be done in C#/VB-like language. In functional languages (e.g. in my favorite F# for .NET) solutions like this are more natural (once you learn the language basics), because supporting code like this was the goal of the language design from the beginning.

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[Michael Dunn]

print join "\n", @{[sort {$a <=> $b} @ARGV]}[$#ARGV/2-2 .. $#ARGV/2+2];

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[Gary R Wheeler]

Hot damn, somebody who likes to do perverted things with batch files as much as I do! :cool: :-D

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Software Zen: delete this;

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[leppie]

And the GWBASIC one? ;P

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[PIEBALDconsult]

Wearing your black waders I hope.

[PIEBALDconsult]

Care to enlighten us as to why you've had to do that?

[Rama Krishna Vavilala]

After completing a LINQ book (which I was reviewing), I found out that LINQ in VB has more features than in C# (query expression wise). I was thinking about a simple example that can be used to demo LINQ in VB and that was it.

Co-Author ASP.NET AJAX in Action

[PIEBALDconsult]

Yeah, but that's still in beta, right? :-D

[Clickok]

PIEBALDconsult wrote:

Yeah, but that's still in beta, right? :-D

VB9 = Visual Beta 9 X|:-D

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[PIEBALDconsult]

Not Vaporware Beta? :-D As VB is just a "prototyping language", it makes sense to use it as a test bed for Linq, before putting the final implementation in C#.

[Brady Kelly]

VB is the next MS dynamic language.

[WillemM]

Linq rules :D

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[Eytukan]

vector<int> vec_num;
for(int i=1;i<argc;i++){
 vec_num.push_back(atoi((char*)argv[i]));
}
sort(vec_num.begin(),vec_num.end());
copy(vec_num.begin()+((vec_num.size()-5)/2),
vec_num.end()-((vec_num.size()-5)/2), ostream_iterator<int>(cout, "\n"));

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The Advantage in work-from-home is that... we can blame the dog -Mark Salsbery Best wishes to Rexx[^]

[Vasudevan Deepak Kumar]

It is really amazing to see a charming quick cut batch file doing that marvellously. :)

Vasudevan Deepak Kumar Personal Homepage Tech Gossips

[Vasudevan Deepak Kumar]

leppie wrote:

GWBASIC

Is it available for download somewhere? I got a copy of QBasic anyway from here: http://www.uv.tietgen.dk/staff/mlha/Download/DOS/microsoft/qbasic.exe[^]

Vasudevan Deepak Kumar Personal Homepage Tech Gossips

[Stuart Dootson]

Haskell

module Main where

import Data.List
import System

main = do nums <- fmap (map (read :: String -> Integer)) getArgs
          (print.take 5.drop (((length nums)-5) `div` 2).sort) nums

[Rama Krishna Vavilala]

5 for using the ostream_iterator alone:)

Co-Author ASP.NET AJAX in Action

[Eytukan]

Anyway, a 5 is a 5 ;P. Btw I think I should learn a new language to reply to your Friday Question. Replies representing all other languages are just there in seconds you post your question.we can't make our replies unique unless I try for a deliberately different technique of the same language.:-D

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The Advantage in work-from-home is that... we can blame the dog -Mark Salsbery Best wishes to Rexx[^]

[PIEBALDconsult]

Here's some C#.

System.Collections.Generic.List<int> list = new System.Collections.Generic.List<int>
(
System.Array.ConvertAll<string,int>
(
args
,
delegate ( string s ) { return ( (int) System.Convert.ChangeType ( s , typeof(int) ) ) ; }
)
) ;

list.Sort() ;

foreach
(
int i
in
list.GetRange
(
args.Length/2-2
,
5
)
)
{
System.Console.WriteLine ( i ) ;
}

This points up two shortcomings of the current (V2) implementation of .net: 1) System.Array doesn't have a GetRange() method 2) Sort() returns void -- returning a reference to the object would be more flexible If these shortcomings were corrected, the above code could be:

foreach
(
int i
in
System.Array.ConvertAll<string,int>
(
args
,
delegate ( string s ) { return ( (int) System.Convert.ChangeType ( s , typeof(int) ) ) ; }
).Sort().GetRange
(
args.Length/2-2
,
5
)
)
{
System.Console.WriteLine ( i ) ;
}

-- modified at 16:33 Saturday 1st September, 2007 Whoops, forgot to protect the angle-brackets -- modified at 16:34 Saturday 1st September, 2007 And then of course I put them backward

[Besir Kasami]

Do you now that the Silverlight Compiler is written in VB.Net???? You should think twice before you say that VB is used only for testing purposes.