Re: Gantt Golf

Now that the contest is over.

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003, Riley wrote:

> I'm new to the whole golfing game, and I'm trying to get my swing down...
>
> Regarding this last puzzle, I've created a solution (albeit extremely long
> in comparison to some of those I've seen in older puzzles), and in trying to
> get a feel for the shortcuts that all of you use, I'm wondering if perhaps
> you can look at what I've done and tell me how to make it shorter.
>
> I apologize for posting this before the puzzle has been closed; I feel my
> solution is so long it won't offend anyone. Here goes:
>
> map{split/
> /

Why do you split according to newline?

> ;$i=shift@_;$l=shift@_;

Instead of mapping over <STDIN> and then splitting explictly it is
possible to use the -p and -a flag to iterate over STDIN and to split the
fields into the @F array.

> my$m;

Why do you need to declare $m here? To initialize it?

> map$m.="-",1..$l;

This and the previous statement can be written as

$m="-"x$l;

> map{$s[$i]=$e[$_]if($e[$_]>$s[
> $i])}@_;

You don't need the parenthesis after the if (they can be omitted for such
statement modifiers). And this statement can be summarized as:

$s[$i]=(sort{$b<=>$a}@e[@_])[0]

> my$n;map$n.=" ",1...$s[$i];

Instead write $n=$"x$s[$i];

$" contains whitespace.

> $e[$i]=$l+$s[$i];

You use $s[$i] several times. You can easily assign it in one of the
statements as the = operator returns the value that was assigned.

print"$i $n$m\n"}<STDIN>

Instead of \n you can have an actual newline.
Like
$a="
";

<STDIN> can be abbreviated as <> in this case.

Of course, what I used was a storage of whitespace strings instead of a
storage of numbers, which can be sorted using regular lexicographic sort.
I'll post an explanation of my program once I get home.

Hope it helps.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

>
> I've been a fan of perl for several years, but my experience has never led
> me to the map and grep functions that I've been seeing all over the place
> (these functions seem to be rather nice shortcuts for "for" and "foreach"
> loops). Looking at the algorithm I've used above, are there any other
> obvious places where I can make this code shorter?
>
> -o0lit3
>
>



----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish        [email protected]
Home Page:         http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/

An apple a day will keep a doctor away. Two apples a day will keep two
doctors away.

	Falk Fish