I thought the general consensus was that we would help people if they had a try at it. He posted code that works, and asked for a better way to do it. I don't see what's so bad about teaching him to do it better (as opposed to at all). map and grep aren't immediately intuitive unless you are already seeped in lisp.
Why not just tell him to put the conditional into a grep statement and it will spit out the right hashes? It hardly takes more effort than blowing him off. As an added bonus, less people will think that you are a grumpy loser monk. ____________________
Jeremy
I didn't believe in evil until I dated it. | [reply] |
He posted code that works,
Err, actually, he didn't. See dvergin's post.
I don't see what's so bad about teaching him to do it
better (as opposed to at all). map and grep aren't
immediately intuitive unless you are already seeped in
lisp.
That's why I told him to take a look at map and grep
(implying, "Read the documentation"). I am not 'seeped in
Lisp'. In fact, I have just started learning some Common
Lisp, yet I've been using map and grep in Perl for
quite some time now. I assume he's intelligent enough to
understand the definition of grep:
grep - locate elements in a list test true against a given criterion
And, using that definition, construct something like
my @matches = grep { ... } keys %friends
as he is apparently already able to retrieve hash keys.
Why not just tell him to put the conditional into a grep statement and it will spit out the right hashes?
Because he can deduce that from reading the documentation on grep. One of Perl's great resources is its extensive documentation. Learning to read the documentation is a good thing, in my opinion.
As an added bonus, less people will think that you are a grumpy loser.
So I'm a grumpy loser now?
[ ar0n -- want job (boston) ]
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