Geeks wanted (neat job application puzzle)

telogis.co.nz

3 points·benhoyt··11 comments

They're doing a bunch of bit voodoo. The ^ operator is XOR, '<<' shifts bits left and '&' is a bitwise AND. That's what they are in C++ at least.

x = a&x ? a&b : c+x is a lot like the C++ shorthand if-then-else thingamabob: x = ( 1 < 0 ) ? 10 : -10; which translates to: x = 10 if 1 < 0 else x = -10.

Not sure what they mean with their thingamabob though.

Their ternary operator is a ternary operator.

Looks pretty close to Ruby: 1) remove semi-colons 2) replace a = b - - with a = b followed by b -= 1 3) while (z) { .. } with while (z) ... end

However the if modifier (if it works as in Ruby) doesn't work out very well. I haven't touched Perl in 9 years, so I don't know how different the operator precedence is if at all.

What's the deal with the if? Is it a regular modifier?

Oh yeah, Ruby has a slightly different interpretation of true/false, so I changed while(z) to while (z != 0) - likewise with if. No help though :(

Yeah baby! I missed one true/false Ruby idiosyncracy, and that did the trick :)

Think "Forth", "RPN", that sort of thing. It got me for a while too.

I did a quick direct translation into Perl and got 'b', 'e', 'o', 'k', 'j', undef, 'b'.

But neither of these exist:

http://www.telogis.co.nz/beokjb.html

http://www.telogis.co.nz/beokjob.html

And I give up really fast on these, so ...

You're really close. Trying to figure out exactly how you managed to get three letters wrong is probably a more interesting problem than the original.

As soon as I looked at it again I realized the problem.

What language is that? It looks like the mutant offspring of C and Perl.

Yeah, I guess it's no real language. The if clause is the weirdest -- it had me stuck for a while.

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