Spoken Number to Decimal, in 256 bytes of C

j.mearie.org

30 points·lifthrasiir··7 comments

Disappointingly, it converts "spelled out" numbers, not "spoken" numbers, to decimal notation. I clicked the link thinking it was a speech-to-text engine in 256 bytes of C, and was let down to find out that it wasn't. It's still very impressive for what it is, though.

Expecting an actual speech-to-text program also, my first thought was, "256 bytes of C, plus how much code in the speech recognition libraries?"

Sorry for the confusion; I have edited the post to use the correct term since then.

This was the problem in a Perl Golf contest a long, long time ago. There were a couple of minor differences in the spec (trillions didn't need to be handled, the result needed to be pretty-printed with thousand-separator commas).

The explanation by Ton Hospel of the winning solution of 115 characters and the later improvement to 109 chars is a thing of beauty: http://www.mail-archive.com/golf@perl.org/msg01568.html

I heartily agree Ton Hospel's solution is amazing (I DID know the existence of the solution), but it is not the same problem. The main difference comes from the difference between C and Perl (you cannot use crypt() in C unless you sacrifice the portability, and Perl's y/...// will cost more bytes in C), and also from the practicalness (my program filters more invalid words out, reducing false positives a lot). Therefore I believe the direct comparison is meaningless here.

Well, sure, but...

No criticism of your solution implied, just something that I thought people who liked the blog post would also enjoy reading.

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