Programming Praxis

Today’s exercise would make a good interview question, though I don’t know of anyone doing that; you should answer as if you are standing at a whiteboard explaining your code as you go:

Given a string and a line width, split the string into words (a maximal run of characters excluding spaces) and write the words onto successive lines with spaces added between the words so that each line is the requested width. Words should be added to lines greedily (as many words as will fit) and extra spaces should be assigned to the left of the output string. The last line should not have spaces added, so it may be shorter than the other lines.

For example, the string “This is an example of text justification” is written with a line width of 16 like this:

    ----+----+----+-
    This    is    an
    example  of text
    justification.
    ----+----+----+-

Your task is to write a program that greedily justifies text. 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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I’ve seen several recent posts on the beginning-programmer forums about how to solve the fizzbuzz problem, so let’s talk about that today:

Enumerate the numbers from 1 to N by writing “Fizz” if the number is divisible by 3, “Buzz” if the number is divisible by 5, “FizzBuzz” if the number is divisible by both, and the number itself if the number is divisible by neither. For instance, counting from 1 to 25 works like this: 1, 2, Fizz, 4, Buzz, Fizz, 7, 8, Fizz, Buzz, 11. Fizz, 13, 14, FizzBuzz, 16, 17, Fizz, 19, Buzz, Fizz, 22, 23, Fizz, Buzz.

FizzBuzz also appears as the first problem in Project Euler, where they characterize the problem like this:

If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. The sum of these multiples is 23. Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000.

Your task is to solve the two versions of the FizzBuzz problem, for all numbers up to N; you can use a simple method, but it is more fun to be a little bit clever. 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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Given a list of integers, calculate a list of integers that contains, at each item of the list, the count of integers in the original list that are greater than the item at the current position of the original list. For example, given the input list (10 12 8 17 3 24 19), the desired output is (4 3 3 2 2 0 0), because at the first item in list, 10, there are four items (12 17 24 19) greater than 10, at the second item in the list, 12, there are three items (17 24 19) greater than 12, at the third item in the list, 8, there are three items (17 24 19) greater than 8, at the fourth item in the list, 17, there are two items (24 19) greater than 17, at the fifth item in the list, 3, there are two items (24 19) greater than 3, at the sixth item in the list, 24, there are 0 items () greater than 24, and at the seventh item in the list, 19, there are 0 items greater than 19.

Your task is to write a program to calculate the list of counts of greater than the current item; is there an O(n) solution? When you are finished, you are welcome to read a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.

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