Odd word problem

Odd word problem is a draft programming task. It is not yet considered ready to be promoted as a complete task, for reasons that should be found in its talk page.

Write a program that solves the odd word problem.

Description: You are promised an input stream consisting of English letters and punctuations. It is guaranteed that

• the words (sequence of consecutive letters) are delimited by one and only one punctuation; that
• the stream will begin with a word; that
• the words will be at least one letter long; and that
• a full stop (.) appears after, and only after, the last word.

For example, what,is,the;meaning,of:life. is such a stream with six words. Your task is to reverse the letters in every other word while leaving punctuations intact, producing e.g. "what,si,the;gninaem,of:efil.", while observing the following restrictions:

1. Only I/O allowed is reading or writing one character at a time, which means: no reading in a string, no peeking ahead, no pushing characters back into the stream, and no storing characters in a global variable for later use;
2. You are not to explicitly save characters in a collection data structure, such as arrays, strings, hash tables, etc, for later reversal;
3. You are allowed to use recursions, closures, continuations, threads, coroutines, etc.

Test case: work on both the "life" example given above, and the text we,are;not,in,kansas;any,more.

Java

This is translated from the first C version on the solutions page. <lang java>import java.io.BufferedReader; import java.io.IOException; import java.io.StringReader;

public class OddWord { public static void processStream(BufferedReader in) throws IOException{ if(checkEnd(in))return; while(true){ forward(in); if(checkEnd(in))return; reverse(in); if(checkEnd(in))return; } }

private static boolean checkEnd(BufferedReader in) throws IOException{ if(peek(in) == '.'){ System.out.println((char)in.read()); return true; }else{ System.out.print((char)in.read()); return false; } }

private static char peek(BufferedReader in) throws IOException{ in.mark(1); char retVal = (char)in.read(); in.reset(); return retVal; }

private static void forward(BufferedReader in) throws IOException{ while(Character.isLetter(peek(in))){ System.out.print((char)in.read()); } }

private static void reverse(BufferedReader in) throws IOException{ if(Character.isLetter(peek(in))){ char character = (char)in.read(); reverse(in); System.out.print(character); } }

public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException{ processStream(new BufferedReader(new StringReader("what,is,the;meaning,of:life."))); processStream(new BufferedReader(new StringReader("we,are;not,in,kansas;any,more."))); processStream(new BufferedReader(new StringReader(";what,is,the;meaning,of:life."))); processStream(new BufferedReader(new StringReader("'we,are;not,in,kansas;any,more."))); } }</lang> Output:

what,si,the;gninaem,of:efil.
we,era;not,ni,kansas;yna,more.
;what,si,the;gninaem,of:efil.
'we,era;not,ni,kansas;yna,more.