Programming Praxis

Sometimes people send me their homework problems and expect me to write programs for them. I ignore such people, but I do collect the tasks and use them in the blog from time to time, always waiting several months until the term has ended. Today’s exercise comes by that route:

Write a program that takes as input a sentence (a sequence of characters) and abbreviates it by replacing each word (a maximal sequence of letters) with the first letter of the word, followed by the number of letters in the middle of the word, followed by the last letter of the word. For instance, Programming Praxis is abbreviated P9g P4s. Any non-letter characters in the input should be retained in their original position in the output.

Your task is to write a program that abbreviates sentences. 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.

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We have today another in our occasional series of exercises on binary trees; the input tree need not necessarily be ordered or balanced:

Given a binary tree containing integers, find the sum of all nodes at an even distance from the root, less the sum of all nodes at an odd distance from the root.

For instance, given the binary tree shown below, the requested sum is 1 – 2 – 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 – 8 – 9 – 10 – 11 – 12 – 13 – 14 – 15 = -74:

           1
     2           3
  4     5     6     7 
 8  9 10 11 12 13 14 15

(I’m not an artist; you’ll have to imagine the lines connecting the various levels.)

Your task is to write a program to compute alternate sums and differences of the nodes of a binary tree. 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.

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Chris Smith tweets mathematical curiosities at @aap03102. This one caught my eye the other day:

This is from 1779: a time when puzzles were written in poetry, solutions were assumed to be integers and answers could be a bit creepy:

Questions proposed in 1779, and answered in 1780.

I. QUESTION 742, by Mr. John Penberthy.

I’m in love with a damsel, the pride of the plain,
Have courted and talk’d in Ovidian strain;
But vain is the rhetoric us’d by my tongue,
She says I’m too old and that she is too young:
From the foll’wing equations, dear ladies, unfold;
If she be too young, or if I be too old.

x³ + xy² = 4640y
x²y − y³ = 537.6x

Where x represents my age, and y the damsel’s.

Your task is to compute the ages of the damsel and her suitor. 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.

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Today’s exercise is simple:

Write a program that prints the longest line in a file. If there is a tie for the longest line, you may print any of the longest lines, or all of them, at your option.

There are lots of ways to solve this problem, and I expect that my fun-loving readers will come up with some outlandish solutions, so to make this a sensible exercise we add two rules: First, if you comment you must provide at least two solutions. Second, at least one of your solutions must be “reasonable” in the sense that you would actually use it in a production environment.

Your task is to write a program to find the longest line in a file. 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.

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Today’s exercise is either an interview question or somebody’s homework, I’m not sure:

Given a list of all the symbols of the chemicals in the periodic table, and a list of all the words in the English language, find the longest word that can be made using symbols of the chemicals in the periodic table.

Your task is to write a program to find the longest word that can be formed from the periodic table. 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.

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Today’s exercise involves sorting:

Write a program that takes exactly four items as input and returns them in sorted order.

Your task is to write a program that sorts exactly four items; can you do it using only five comparisons? 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.

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Many programming languages are interactive, with their primary interface a read-eval-print loop. Scheme is like that, so is Python, and so is the primary language I use in my day job, Oracle SQL*Plus, and so too are many other languages.

One feature many of those languages share is a way to edit files from the REPL. For instance, in SQL*Plus, the most recently-entered command is available in a buffer, and if you say “edit” the buffer will be loaded into whatever $EDITOR you specified, so you can modify the command as needed; when the editor returns, the modified buffer is then executed.

Although Scheme doesn’t provide such an editing feature, I have been using my own for years. It’s very simple, less than a dozen lines of code, and greatly enhances my productivity.

Your task is to write an editing interface for your favorite REPL. 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.

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Today’s exercise is simple, but some languages make it hard:

Write a program that returns an input string with each space character in the string doubled. For instance, the string “hello hello” (with one space between the two words) is transformed to “hello  hello” (with two spaces between the two words).

That may not come out right in all browsers; here is the transformation again, with space characters replaced by plus signs for visibility, using a constant-space font:

"hello+hello" => "hello++hello"

Depending on your language, that might be an easy task, or a hard one. You may have to deal with memory allocation, or non-mutable strings, or appends that blow up to quadratic time.

Your task is to write a program that doubles the space characters in its input. 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.

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