Re: (Golf) Nearest Neighbors

[danger]

As Tortue points out, all the ones using lexigraphic sorting fail on some sets of numbers. Stripping leading spaces and newlines, my stab weighs in at 87 characters:

sub nn {
    @_=sort{$a<=>$b}@_;
    $_[1]-$_[0]>$_[$_+1]-$_[$_]and@_[0,1]=@_[$_,$_+1]for 1..@_-2;
    @_[0,1]
}

[MeowChow]

Very nice! Sniping one character gives:

sub nn {
    @_=sort{$a<=>$b}@_;
    $_[1]-$_[0]>$_[$_]-$_[$_-1]and@_[0,1]=@_[$_,$_-1]for 2..$#_;
    @_[0,1]
}

The number to beat is 86...

   MeowChow                                   
               s aamecha.s a..a\u$&owag.print

[satchboost]

This doesn't deal with duplicates. If you want to deal with duplicates, I think you change it to:


sub nn {
    @_{@_}=0;@_=sort{$a<=>$b}keys%_;
    $_[1]-$_[0]>$_[$_]-$_[$_-1]and@_[0,1]=@_[$_,$_-1]for 2..$#_;
    @_[0,1]
}

That brings the total from 86 to 99. I'm not sure if the spec requires that duplicates be treated as one element or separate elements.