Programming Praxis

Eric Lippert, at his blog Fabulous Adventures in Coding, discusses the problem of comma quibbling, which turns a list of words like (“ABC” “DEF” “G” “H”) into the string “ABC, DEF, G and H” with commas between each pair of words except the last pair, which gets the word “and” (without a comma). Here are the rules:

1. If the input is empty, so is the output.
2. If the input has a single word, so does the output.
3. If the input has two words, the output is the two words separated by “and”.
4. If the input has more than two words, the output is all the words, separated by commas, but with the last comma replaced by “and”.

A word is a maximal sequence of characters not containing a comma or a space.

Your task is to write a function that adds commas to a list of words, using the rules described above. 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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