Path: csiph.com!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!nntp.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Tim Rentsch Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: Sort of trivial code challenge - may be interesting to you anyway Date: Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:44:57 -0800 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 33 Message-ID: <86v7feei2e.fsf@linuxsc.com> References: <10n80sc$3soe4$1@dont-email.me> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Injection-Date: Mon, 02 Mar 2026 08:45:03 +0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="879346d16fc7c1cd3f18baf5c462c148"; logging-data="1046631"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX18gUgVC6HmtqxrgccFZyYz9EpuTZI250w0=" User-Agent: Gnus/5.11 (Gnus v5.11) Emacs/22.4 (gnu/linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:Mlmke83kPUWyjOM8Ee2OWK5whOQ= sha1:R+sJywyp0nKI1YQbwdg0BdPpFyo= Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.c:396724 DFS writes: > Challenge is to output sequential numbers by column then row: > > 1 6 11 16 21 > 2 7 12 17 22 > 3 8 13 18 23 > 4 9 14 19 24 > 5 10 15 20 25 [...] > Simple enough. But the following 2 requirements take it from trivial > to less trivial! > > -------------------------------------------------------------------- > 1) must be able to cut the output off at any arbitrary value > lower than rows x columns > -------------------------------------------------------------------- [...] > -------------------------------------------------------------------- > 2) if you don't specify rows and columns, your solution must try > to calculate them to form a square (same # of rows and columns) > that includes only 1 to N. > > If rows=columns can't be calculated, return message 'not possible' > -------------------------------------------------------------------- A straightfoward exercise. Here is a counter challenge to make things more interesting: as above, but don't use nested loops (or goto's, etc).