[Talk] Question about scripts

[Nick Simicich]

On Thu, 7 Sep 2006 14:19, Kwan Lowe wrote:
> Not really Linux related so I'm posting it here...
>
> Say you get a request to print out the first 10 digits of Pi in the 
> fewest possible
> number of lines (source).  You turn in the following:
>
> #!/bin/sh
> echo "3.141592653"

Leave out the first line, /bin/sh is understood as a special case 
default by exec(2).

> The instructor marks it wrong, and argues that it's contrary to the 
> spirit of the
> assignment.  What do you folks think?

You gave the assignment as "print out", not "calculate and print out". 
If he gave the assignment that way, I'd take him to the dean.

I once had a friend who had an assignment in Fortran programming that 
could not be done because when done in the most obvious way, it suffered 
an overflow on their DEC machine. Before IEEE floating point, different 
manufacturers built floating point unite to different standards, and IBM 
had allowed more exponent bits.

He called me and I suggested two alternatives. One was using logarithms 
and the other was to keep the intermediate results in an array - he used 
the array method, and solved the problem. The instructor failed him 
without looking at his program, he assumed that he had worked it out by 
hand and written a program to print the result, while turning in some 
fake program. He "knew", you see, that there was an intermediate resukt 
that overflowed on their DEC.

In a subsequent meeting between him, the Dean, and the instructor which 
was highlighted by him walking them through the program and showing how 
he solved it, it came out that the instructor knew no Fortran and could 
not actually read my friend's program. He was not invited back the 
following term.

Many languages have a pi constant, would that have been acceptable?

In apl it could have been written as:

QQ<- 11 T QQ <- O 1

Where QQ is the quad quote
T is take
O is large circle

The numeric pi is converted to a string, and then the first 11 positions 
of the string are extracted and output.

--Nick Simicich njs@scifi.squawk.com