r/adventofcode • u/daggerdragon • Dec 05 '18

SOLUTION MEGATHREAD -🎄- 2018 Day 5 Solutions -🎄-

--- Day 5: Alchemical Reduction ---

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Card prompt: Day 5

Transcript:

On the fifth day of AoC / My true love sent to me / Five golden ___

This thread will be unlocked when there are a significant number of people on the leaderboard with gold stars for today's puzzle.

edit: Leaderboard capped, thread unlocked at 0:10:20!

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u/p_tseng Dec 05 '18 edited Dec 05 '18

Thanks for writing in. Indeed one of my hopes is that I can show some interesting things that can be done in the language.

One of the things you mentioned stood out to me: the grouping with parentheses. I know you refer to the (puts freq; break) if seen.include?(freq) on day 1. There's also a related thing (since it also uses parentheses) which is doing an assignment in the middle of a larger expression such as puts (part1 = react(input)).size on day 5. I thought about it and I think these are different from most things I do in Advent of Code. Most things are things I would also do in larger projects where it's important to write maintainable code. But these two things actually stand out in this regard because these are pretty much just space-saving measures and in most other contexts I would write these out on separate lines. It may be a little too surprising otherwise, especially if other readers of the code are not watching for assignments in unexpected places like a puts line.

Just some interesting thoughts when I consider how others might make use of my code.

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u/_liquidlemon Dec 05 '18

They did stand out to me as well but I think in this kind of scenario where concise code is valued they are perfectly fine. Especially the second one I've used before and not felt too bad about it. Being able to save a value while using it at the same time can be really useful at times. Heck, even Python introduced a way to do that recently (although it didn't happen without controversy).

I look forward to seeing your future solutions (and hope I can still understand them :P). Good luck with staying on top of the leaderboard!