Talk:FizzBuzz

From Rosetta Code

FizzBuzzJazz

I wasn't satisfied with the approach most of the languages were taking, so I added a second approach to PHP, that uses the concatenation operator. I almost added a third code example as an extension of the puzzle, to demonstrate the approach.

I wanted to add a third term, "Jazz", to appear on multiples of 7. So 7 would have been "Jazz", 21/42/84 would have been "FizzJazz", 35/70 would have been BuzzJazz, and 105 (if the loop were to get that far) would have been FizzBuzzJazz. The if-else ladder approach would have needed three additional if statements to accommodate, while the concatenation approach would have needed only one.

This is probably a good time to point out that FizzBuzz is classified as a puzzle; As the header template suggests, "Multiple approaches are not discouraged." So if you've got a better way to solve the problem for a given language, let's see it! --Short Circuit 13:24, 31 October 2007 (MDT)

Puzzle talk

Why was this taken out of the puzzle category? As far as I can tell....it is a puzzle. Besides that, if it's not a puzzle, then what is it? --Mwn3d 14:03, 11 December 2007 (MST)

I removed it, since it's not a puzzle since no thinking is involved in solving it. All that it is, is writing the specification in the syntax of a language.
The thought is in how to do best do it in a given language. When the task first went up, most of the exaples used an if-elseif-else approach, which couldn't really be expanded efficiently. (See the FizzBuzzJazz comment above.) Also, compare the text of Template:Task and Template:Puzzle. Their goals differ slightly. While a normal task benefits more from syntactical and functional uniformity, a puzzle benefits from drawing out how different approaches affect efficiency. (Also...Sign your posts with --~~~~.) --Short Circuit 21:25, 11 December 2007 (MST)
I think the whole idea behind FizzBuzz is that it misleads people to think it is a puzzle, while in reality it is not. The straightforward solution with if-elseif-else is the best and easiest, but most people start to think they should do something "clever" to combine the fizz and buzz parts. Trying to do that, it is easy to make a mistake. That is why FizzBuzz has been used in testing job applicants.
--PauliKL 13:28, 20 September 2008 (UTC)