Re^4: Finding all Combinations

[Limbic~Region]

roboticus,
I am glad that you were able to decipher given my description of how the algorithm works. I am interested in knowing what was the minor bug and what code was never executed? If you found this interesting, might I suggest you move on to How A Function Becomes Higher Order and my iterator tutorial.

[roboticus]

Limbic~Region:

The minor bug is that this statement:

    $position[0] == @list ? $done = 1 : $next = 1;

never sets the $done flag. I think you meant:

    @position == @list ? $done = 1 : $next = 1;

And because $done is never set,

        return () if $done;

never executes. It's a truly minor bug though, because you have another bit of code that detects the end condition:

            return () if $by > @list;

So I just removed $done entirely. (Actually, looking at my code, when I was rearranging, I removed that last condition. I should've kept it because my code tests for the end condition on every call, where your terminator checks only when it's time to go to the next size of results. I'll update my node to reflect that.)

The other thing I did was remove $end_pos since its value has such a limited lifetime, and add a passel of comments so I wouldn't forget how it works!

Now off to How A Function Becomes Higher Order and yer iterator toot!

--roboticus

[Limbic~Region]

roboticus,
That's not in the bug in the sense that it results in incorrect behavior. Minor quibble aside - you are right that it does not belong. It's left over from a previous revisions. The original version I had was much closer to blokhead's code which does not precalulate stop values and ends up spinning cycles doing math every iteration. Next I reversed the array so the index could be used to determine stop value with less math. This was unfortunate because I still had to do some math and reverse the return. Finally, I realized I could precalulate the stop values but didn't do a good job of cleaning up my false starts.

Thanks for the analysis - glad to have been some help.