Triangle Roll-Up
September 23, 2014
We have a simple little exercise today: Given a list, write a triangle showing successive sets of sums of the pair-wise elements of the list. For instance, given the input 4, 7, 3, 6, 7, your program should write this output:
81
40 41
21 19 22
11 10 9 13
4 7 3 6 7
The original list is at the bottom of the triangle. The next row up has pair-wise sums of the elements of the list: 4 + 7 = 11, 7 + 3 = 10, 3 + 6 = 9, and 6 + 7 = 13. The next row up has pair-wise sums of those list elements: 11 + 10 = 21, 10 + 9 = 19, and 9 + 13 = 22. The next-to-top row has only two sums: 21 + 19 = 40 and 19 + 22 = 41. And finally the top row is the sum of those two numbers: 40 + 41 = 81.
Your task is to write a program to print the triangle roll-up of an input list. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.
Programming Praxis 