Friday Programming Quiz

Rama Krishna Vavilala

Given a set of numbers passed to the command line. The number of number is always odd. The program should sort them and output the 5 numbers in the middle. For example, if there are 9 numbers the output should be sorted numbers from indices 2 to 6. e.g.

c:> med5 67 89 12 1 8 1 3 5 7
3
5
7
8
12

Full marks to a VB.NET 9.0 solution.;)

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Tomas Petricek

Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:

Full marks to a VB.NET 9.0 solution.

Now, that's a challenge!! I haven't used VB for at least 5 years, but here we go...

Sub Main(ByVal args() As String)
For Each n In (From a In args Select r = Int32.Parse(a) Order By r Skip (args.Length - 5) / 2 Take 5)
Console.WriteLine(n)
Next
End Sub

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Marc Clifton

Tomas Petricek wrote:

For Each n In (From a In args Select r = Int32.Parse(a) Order By r Skip (args.Length - 5) / 2 Take 5)

That's both impressive and scary. (And not that it's VB, but what you can do with Linq) Marc

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Miszou

@echo off set /a count=1 :: Load all the numbers :loop echo %1 > _%count%.var set /a count=count+1 shift if "%1" == "" goto :startSort goto loop :startSort set /a total=count-1 :RestartSort set /a count=1 :sortLoop set /a next=%count%+1 call :swap %count% %next% set /a count=count+1 if "%swapped%" == "true" goto :RestartSort if "%count%" == "%total%" goto :output goto :sortLoop :swap set /P var1="" < _%1.var set /P var2="" < _%2.var if /I %var1% LEQ %var2% goto noSwap ren _%1.var _temp.var ren _%2.var _%1.var ren _temp.var _%2.var set swapped=true goto :eof :noSwap set swapped= goto :eof :output set /A offset=((%total%-5)/2)+1 set /A limit=%offset%+4 for /L %%i in (%offset%,1,%limit%) do call :showval %%i :cleanup erase *.var set next= set offset= set total= set count= set var= set var1= set var2= goto :eof

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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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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.

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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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Vasudevan Deepak Kumar

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

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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[^]

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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