Talk:Teacup rim text
Limiting output
It seems that there could be a lot of output generated - maybe alter the wording to ask for example words and maybe summaries of words found of particular lengths? --Paddy3118 (talk) 20:47, 4 August 2019 (UTC)
- I think it would be better to use a common (available) dictionary (so we could compare results). -- Gerard Schildberger (talk) 22:35, 4 August 2019 (UTC)
A good task description specifies a problem rather than a procedure
The real task/problem here is to identify and display a subset of words (in a given lexicon) that are 'circular' in the sense which you describe.
The current formulation (para 3) is the narration of a procedure, rather than the statement of a problem or task, and is perhaps not yet quite consistent with the Rosetta Code goal (see the landing page) of aiding a person with a grounding in one approach to a problem in learning another.
(Not all languages or techniques of code composition are built around a notion of 'procedure'. In the traditions (and even architectures) of Lisp, Scheme, Racket, Prolog, ML, Haskell etc, the process of evaluation is central).
More productive, in the Rosetta Code context, to just state the problem, leave the technique of its solution to the contributors, and let a hundred flowers bloom. Hout (talk) 12:04, 5 August 2019 (UTC)
- Well I've just had a go at making the task less prescriptive yet with a view to limiting the output. It wasn't easy and I would have been nice to have a nice mathematical way of representing the permutation technique, in the same way that one can with big sigma and big pi for arithmetic formulae. Axtens (talk) 07:44, 6 August 2019 (UTC)
- Unfortunately, following the rewording, it's no longer clear that only one permutation of each set of qualifying words should be printed. After: "Display one line for each set of teacup rim words." I suggest you add the following:
- "Having listed a set, for example [ate tea eat], refrain from displaying permutations of that set, e.g. [eat tea ate] etc."
should programming solutions be assuming caseless words?
I know the specified dictionary of words (now) to be used has no uppercase letters (or any words with non-letters), but should (or could) it be assumed for the general case that the words are to be treated as caseless (that is, the case [upper/lower/mixed] is to be ignored? I would think that general solutions would be implemented and not have the computer program solutions be geared to a specific dictionary. -- Gerard Schildberger (talk) 21:20, 5 August 2019 (UTC)
- I'd think that when dealing with dictionaries and spellings the default is to not consider case - i.e. case insensitive. --Paddy3118 (talk) 21:41, 5 August 2019 (UTC)
- Yuppers, my thinking also. But I just wanted to hear it from the horse's mouth. (Er ... that's some form of a compliment.) I also assumed they might be phrases in the dictionary, words that contain non-letters, and possibly malformed words. -- Gerard Schildberger (talk) 21:46, 5 August 2019 (UTC)
- Okay, here's the horse speaking. I don't care about case as such. The original illustration of the teacup used uppercase letters. So for the sake of sanity, assume that "Tea" is the same as "TEA". Interestingly, English does not appear to offer solutions in words of any length greater than three. Now if I had the Oxford Unabridged's word list with words from Old and Middle English, who knows what might be found. Axtens (talk) 07:44, 6 August 2019 (UTC)