OpenEuphoria

Re: contest questions

• Posted by Derek Parnell <ddparnell at bigpond.com> Mar 02, 2002
• 458 views

I assume that the only thing that one can assume is - that you can't assume
anything about the inputs.

In fact, I'd assume the worst - that the inputs just might be invalid - so
make the appropriate checks and adjustments. Code defensively.
----------
Derek.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Craig" <rds at RapidEuphoria.com>
To: "EUforum" <EUforum at topica.com>
Subject: Re: contest questions


>
> Chris Bensler writes:
> > Will the input cipher ALWAYS be upper case? Otherwise the program
> > will need to convert the cipher to all uppercase first, to standardize
it.
>
> Yes, you can assume that the cipher line will be present,
> and will be all capitals, and will have exactly one occurrence
> of each of the 26 letters.
>
> Jeremy Self writes:
> > I'm thinking of entering the Beginner's contest,
> > and was wondering if using the machine code library
> > would be allowed or not. Thanks
>
> You can include machine.e if you want, and you can do
> peeks and pokes if you want, but I'm going to disallow
> the use of machine code routines. I'll also disallow
> system() calls to external programs (that might not
> even be written in Euphoria). This is supposed to be
> a test of Euphoria programming skill, not machine code
> or C or anything else.
>
> C.K. Lester writes:
> > For the contests, what is "standard input?"
>
> It's file number 0.
> i.e. your program should read from file 0,
> using for example, getc(0) or gets(0),
> and write to file 1, using puts(1, ...) or printf(1, ...) etc.
> It should be possible to run your program
> from a command line, such as:
>
>         ex yourprog < english.txt > coded.txt
>
> > Or is standard input the keyboard?
>
> Without the "<" on the command-line
> it would be, but I'm not going to test it that way.
>
> > Also, will the cipher line necessarily be sequential? For instance,
> > might we encounter:
>
> >ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
> > PRSTWUVZQMABCDEFGHXYIJKLNO <-- cipher line
> >
> > This is a simple one-to-one replacement, but the cipher line, you'll
> > note, is not sequential.
>
> I'm not sure what you are driving at,
> but the cipher line could be any random shuffling
> of the letters A to Z, with no duplicate letters.
> The example I give on the Web page is in sequential order in places,
> but that's just because I started with ABC..YZ, and was kind of
> lazy in shuffling things around.
>
> I'll add these points to the Web page.
>
> Regards,
>    Rob Craig
>    Rapid Deployment Software
>    http://www.RapidEuphoria.com
>
>
>
>