RogerBW's Blog

I've been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. This one dealt with finding letters in words and the mean of circular quantities.

Create a script that accepts two strings, let us call it, “stones” and “jewels”. It should print the count of “alphabet” from the string “stones” found in the string “jewels”. For example, if your stones is “chancellor” and “jewels” is “chocolate”, then the script should print “8”. To keep it simple, only A-Z,a-z characters are acceptable. Also make the comparison case sensitive.

This is pretty straightforward: make a list of the characters appearing in the first parameter, and check the characters in the second against it. We also sanitise the parameters to contain only the allowed characters.

my $a=shift @ARGV or die "need two parameters\n";
$a =~ s/[^A-Za-z]//g;
my %s=map {$_ => 1} split '',$a;

my $b=shift @ARGV or die "need two parameters\n";
$b =~ s/[^A-Za-z]//g;
my $t=0;
map {$t += (exists $s{$_}?1:0)} split '',$b;

print "$t\n";

This is quite similar in Perl6, though the syntax for character classes is different; and when I did a split, I found I got null start and end characters, so the final map became a little more fiddly.

my $a=shift @*ARGS or die "need two parameters\n";
$a ~~ s:g/<-[A..Za..z]>//;
my %s=map {$_ => 1}, split '',$a;

my $b=shift @*ARGS or die "need two parameters\n";
$b ~~ s:g/<-[A..Za..z]>//;
my $t=0;
map {if ($_ and %s{$_}:exists) {$t++}}, split '',$b;

say $t;

Create a script that prints mean angles of the given list of angles in degrees. Please read wiki page that explains the formula in details with an example.

We have from that page a formula to implement, so that's easy: convert the angles to radians, calculate and sum their sines and cosines, take the mean of each and the two-argument arctangent.

Yes, there's no predefined π in Perl5. Though it's available in modules and if I were doing this seriously I'd use Math::Trig.

my $pi=3.1415926535;

my ($s,$c,$n)=(0,0,0);
foreach my $angle (@ARGV) {
  my $aa=$angle*$pi/180;
  $s+=sin($aa);
  $c+=cos($aa);
  $n++;
}
my $oa=atan2($s/$n,$c/$n);
print $oa*180/$pi,"\n";

For Perl6, I'd hoped to use the built-in Complex number type to implement the other statement of the formula, but it turns out not to have an argument (phase angle) function, at least in the language core. So my Perl6 version is basically the same as the Perl5 with minor syntax changes (and it does have a predefined π).