alt Hacker NewsI wasn't in this class myself, but one prof at my alma mater started his "Programming 201" class with the simplest assignment: write a C program that accepts two integers from the user and prints their sum. It actually was the only assignment for the rest of the semester, since he has a test suite that would humiliate the students gently at first, but would ultimately pipe a billion nines into stdin as the first argument.
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jeffrallen • yesterday at 3:40 PM
Would be fun to write a program that arranges to send the input into dc(1) and just outsource the whole problem to Ken or Rob or whoever wrote it. :)
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clark_dent • yesterday at 3:58 PM
Could you humor a coding noob--how do you deal with utterly insane inputs like that?
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It's a little awkward, because you'd need to parse the strings in reverse, but if all you need to do is sum, you can do it one digit at a time, while at any given moment only handling only one character from each input string, a carry byte, and one output character.