Ok, enough of philosophical discussions about computer science, lets see how good we are at solving practical problems. This is the one I had to solve yesterday, by the way.
Problem: Given a string that could contain arithmetic expressions, with the addition that numeric constants could be potentially expressed as times, e.g 1:36 for 96 seconds, or 2:10:08 for 2 hours 10 minutes and 8 seconds, also decimal fractions after seconds are allowed, e.g 3:45.6 or 3:40:50.67, replace all the time values with their equivalent number of seconds. Solution language: Anything you want. Extra credit: minimum development time, minimum execution time, do it in one pass of the string (looking at each character no more than once, related to minimum execution time), do it in one nasty Perl statement (can this be done at all?), do it in Javascript (to offload the web server, desktops have lots CPU cycles that the user absolutely does not care about, good response time for the user, less load on the web server) Reward: public exposure of your skills, increased pool of references when trying to get a hot job, possibly a good job offer from somebody on the PLUG. -- Sasha Pachev AskSasha Linux Consulting http://asksasha.com /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
