123
votes
Interpretation of Truthy/Falsey
Consider the following pseudocode:
if (x) {
print "x is truthy";
}
else {
print "x is falsy";
}
If it results in a runtime or a compile-time error then <...
- 42.8k
42
votes
Interpretation of Truthy/Falsey
Truthy/Falsey should be taken as strictly defined in the given language. For example, in javascript, the following are always falsey:
undefined
null
NaN
0
""
false
And other values are always ...
- 69.2k
39
votes
Interpretation of Truthy/Falsey
Some languages have ambiguity in what is considered truthy/falsey. For example in c, zero vs non-zero is always FALSE vs TRUE from the point of view of conditional operators. But many standard APIs, ...
- 69.2k
24
votes
What's a string?
I agree with the wikipedia definition. It's a sequence of characters. As the name suggests, it's one-dimensional. I program a lot in C and sometimes in Pascal, which both implement strings in ...
- 24.8k
19
votes
Standard definitions of terms within specifications
"uniformly random"
There are two distinct things to define for "uniform" (in the context of uniformly distributed random variables).
If "uniform" is not specified, then &...
- 10.7k
19
votes
Interpretation of Truthy/Falsey
Don't forget program exit codes!
If my C or C++ or perl or bash or ... program calls exit(0) this action could be considered truthy, and calling ...
- 399
16
votes
Standard definitions of terms within specifications
"Black-Box-Functions"
The content (i.e. the code) of black-box-functions may not be accessed, you can only call them (passing arguments if applicable) and observe their output.
They should ...
- 43.1k
14
votes
Interpretation of Truthy/Falsey
I would partition values into the categories truthy, falsy, and indeterminate according to the following rules:
The following values are considered falsy:
the zero value of the type of the result, ...
- 9,960
12
votes
Standard definitions of terms within specifications
"Positive", "Negative", "Non-Negative", "Non-Positive"
Positive, by default, means strictly positive, ie. all N larger than zero. Zero is not a positive number.
...
Jo KingMod
- 44.7k
11
votes
Accepted
How can we clearly define "Must work for theoretically large values"?
This is what I use in my challenges (with slightly different wordings):
The algorithm should theoretically work for arbitrarily large input values. In practice, it is acceptable if the program is ...
- 99.4k
9
votes
Accepted
What counts as distinct and consistent?
Outputs are consistent if they are equal in the sanest and most obvious way of comparing them. For example, if you have two char * strings in C or C++, and you try
<...
- 57.1k
7
votes
Standard definitions of terms within specifications
Universally testable answers
An answer will be considered to be universally testable if:
It is written in a programming language which has a compiler/interpreter available on Windows, Linux & Mac ...
- 1,005
6
votes
How can we clearly define "Must work for theoretically large values"?
I don't this cannot be defined in in an objective and satisfactory way.
We can talk about the behavior of a program as more memory is added to a computer, or more computing time is given. Since we ...
Wheat WizardMod
- 87.7k
5
votes
What are string literals?
I find this might be a case where the OP expects answers to respect the “spirit of the law” rather than solely the “letter of the law.”
If the OP expected full compliance, then yes, languages like ...
- 103
3
votes
What's a string?
A string is also a list of single character strings. For example:
["H", "e", "l", "l", "o", ",", " ", "w", "o", "r", "l", "d", "!"]
While technically different, ...
- 17k
2
votes
Interpretation of Truthy/Falsey
Answers should be able to specify what is truthy and what is falsy
Almost all of the answers here are either ambiguous or put some languages at a disadvantage.
For the top rated answer, there are many ...
- 2,622
2
votes
Interpretation of Truthy/Falsey
I think Truthy/Falsey instead of being language specific is problem (answer) specific. So in a language we can define different truthy/falsey s based on different conditions. For example one can ...
- 5,575
2
votes
What's a string?
If a language makes a distinction between char[] and String, I think a good question to ask is "Does a char[] print like a ...
- 28.5k
1
vote
What's a string?
You're over-thinking the problem. Unless the challenge specifically states that you must use the native "string" type of the language, you get to interpret what "string" means in a way that's most ...
- 489
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible