# Perl Weekly Challenge 270: Special Positions

These are some answers to the Week 270, Task 1, of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on May 26, 2024 at 23:59). This blog post provides some solutions to this challenge. Please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

Task 1: Special Positions

You are given a m x n binary matrix.

Write a script to return the number of special positions in the given binary matrix.

A position (i, j) is called special if $matrix[i][j] == 1 and all other elements in the row i and column j are 0.

Example 1

This week in PSC (124) | 2023-11-16

This week we:

  • Reviewed some recent email threads:
    • Returning values from require multiple times - seems not useful as compared to using do FILE or the new load_module builtin
    • CPAN.pm observed to use lots of memory, but also complicated to fix. It might benefit a new smaller simpler tool being provided by Perl core
  • Perl 5.39.5 is due soon and we have release managers up to 5.39.8, but we’re still in need of folks to do up to 5.40.0

Perl Weekly Challenge #236 - Lemonade Stand

Welcome back to another round of the weekly challenge, with just one solution this week. I'm setting up a lemonade stand and need to deal with change. Interestingly, I can only sell one juice per person, so I hope you're not super thirsty!

We can take $5, $10, and $20 bills, and we don't start with any change, so we need our previous customers to provide us with change for future customers. Let's find out if we can make change for a set of customers.

Here's the code:

plenv-libdirs

A plenv plugin to add additional include directories to Perl.

This plugin sets the contents of file .perl-libdirs. It hooks into plenv-exec command and every time you run perl or any other command under plenv, plenv-libdirs uses the .perl-libdirs files to set the PERL5LIB environment variable.

plenv-libdirs makes use of .perl-libdirs files in the current working directory and every directory between it and root. Environment variable PERL5LIB has a list of paths separated (like in PATH) by a colon on Unixish platforms and by a semicolon on Windows (the proper path separator being given by the command perl -V:path_sep). When plenv-libdirs collects the paths from .perl-libdirs files, the order of the paths follows the order of the directories. The longer the path to .perl-libdirs file, the higher precedence in PERL5LIB.

Perl Weekly Challenge 269: Distribute Elements

These are some answers to the Week 269, Task 2, of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on May 19, 2024 at 23:59). This blog post provides some solutions to this challenge. Please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

Task 2: Distribute Elements

You are given an array of distinct integers, @ints.

Write a script to distribute the elements as described below:

1) Put the 1st element of the given array to a new array @arr1. 2) Put the 2nd element of the given array to a new array @arr2.

Once you have one element in each arrays, @arr1 and @arr2, then follow the rule below:

If the last element of the array @arr1 is greater than the last element of the array @arr2 then add the first element of the given array to @arr1 otherwise to the array @arr2.

When done distribution, return the concatenated arrays. @arr1 and @arr2.

Hash of Arrays Deathmatch : Native Perl vs. DBM::Deep vs. Redis

Sometimes one has to make compromises between speed of execution and memory, other times one may not have to be. While working towards a fairly (at least in my mind) complete solution to map Nanopore Sequencing files, I ran against the need to create and access fairly large hash of arrays (think of 1M - 100Mof keys), with each array itself consisting of a a fixed number of elements.
The hash of arrays is a fairly straightforward and fast data structure to create in Perl, the memory overhead can be substantial as the number of keys and values scale upwards. While in my application (at least as envisioned now!) the hash will be created, aggregated over (group by for those into python-pandas or r-data.table vernacular) and then discarded, there are use cases in which the data should be preserved to avoid the computational expensive part of generating them via approximate string matching in biological databases.

Writing Perl with Emacs: Are there perl-mode users around?

Emacs comes with two different major modes to edit Perl code: perl-mode and cperl-mode.

perl-mode is somewhat stuck with the Perl syntax of 5.14, has less features, but a cleaner implementation. cperl-mode is up to date with Perl 5.38 and has deeper understanding of Perl syntax, but a somewhat arcane implementation, most of it written in the previous century.

With all due respect to TIMTOWTDI, maintaining two major modes turns out to be not enough fun in the long run, and last week Stefan Kangas opened a wishlist item to Making perl-mode.el obsolete.

The mail thread shows that some people prefer perl-mode because it is less "colorful" and intrusive than cperl-mode. Therefore, the idea is to enable cperl-mode to (optionally) look like and behave like perl-mode. That way, perl-mode.el can be obsoleted without making those users uncomfortable: perl-mode would continue to exist as a custom theme of cperl-mode.

Perl Weekly Challenge #235 - Splicing and Dicing

Hi everybody, we've got another two challenges this week, so let's dive into them!

Remove One

The goal is to see if there's any one number that can be removed to make the set sorted in increasing order. Here's the code:

Perl Weekly Challenge 269: Bitwise OR

These are some answers to the Week 269, Task 1, of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on May 19, 2024 at 23:59). This blog post provides some solutions to this challenge. Please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

Task 1: Bitwise OR

You are given an array of positive integers, @ints.

Write a script to find out if it is possible to select two or more elements of the given array such that the bitwise OR of the selected elements has at least one trailing zero in its binary representation.

Example 1

This week in PSC (117) | 2023-09-21

Two of us again, here's the summary of our meeting:

  • While implementing PPC 0013, it turned out it was vague in some places, so further discussions and refinements to the PPC document are needed
  • POD extensions - do we keep stealing features from Markdown (like tables, images, language markers)? Do we switch to Markdown? Neither are easy.
  • We’ve disabled the Wiki and enabled Issues on the PPCs repository, to better separate discussions on the form and substance of PPCs
  • PPC 0022 will soon be merged, and moved to “Exploratory” status

Single Color Methods of GTC

Whohoo release 1.7 (and 1.6) brought a thorough architectural rewrite, new color spaces (HSV, HWB, YIQ), new formats ([named] array, string and css_string), choosable value ranges, closed both open issues, and introduced the named argument API I wrote last time about. And as promised, this post is about the methods: distance, set, add and blend.

Of Go, C, Perl and fastq file conversion Vol IV : gone in 60 seconds (or less)

In the final part of this series, we will test the performance of the four parsers, in a scenario emulating the batch analysis of sequencing data. We will use the sample fastq file 3_OHara_S2_rbcLa_2019_minq7.fastq from https://zenodo.org/record/3736457. This is a 35MB file of 21791 long sequences for a nanopore experiment. Download the data and save them to a directory in your hard disk. Then use the following bash time_fastq2a_shell.txt (change the extension to .sh before running!) to process this file 500 times with each of the four methods : seqtk (C), seqkit (Go), perl - regex (code presented here  saved into fastq2a_regex_comp_in_func.pl file) and perl - flag (code presented there saved into the fastq2a_flag.pl file).


Issue the following from the command line to store the timings as a tab separated file:

Perl Weekly Challenge 268: Number Game

These are some answers to the Week 268, Task 2, of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on May 12, 2024 at 23:59). This blog post provides some solutions to this challenge. Please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

Task 2: Number Game

You are given an array of integers, @ints, with even number of elements.

Write a script to create a new array made up of elements of the given array. Pick the two smallest integers and add it to new array in decreasing order i.e. high to low. Keep doing until the given array is empty.

Example 1

This week in PSC (116) | 2023-09-14

There were only two of us this week, and the list is still a bit quiet.

The main topic was stalled PPC work: we have a few PPCs that have been approved and are in the “Implementing” state, but still waiting for an implementor. We’ll send a separate email asking for volunteers on those.

CGI::Tiny & Dispatch::Fu - nearly a perfect match

CGI::Tiny is a very nice, Perlish way to construct CGI scripts these days. It is perfectly suited as a replacement to CGI.pm and is quite at home in a shared hosting environment.

Here's the example from the POD [1] on metacpan:

    use CGI::Tiny;
    cgi {
      my $cgi = $_;
      # set up error handling on $cgi
      # inspect request data via $cgi
      # set response headers if needed via $cgi
      # render response with $cgi->render or $cgi->render_chunk
    }; 
        

I recently coupled this with my new module Dispatch::Fu [2], and it worked exceedingly well. It is a darn pleasure to consider from a distance, if I do say so myself:

Perl Weekly Challenge #234 - Sharing is Caring

Hi everybody! Back this week with a (surprisingly long) solution to just Task 1 of the weekly challenge. Task 2 makes no sense to me at all because it seems like examples 1 and 3 disagree with each other. Just sticking to one challenge for that reason. Anyways, let's dive into it!

The goal here is to find the letters that all the provided words share. Here's the code:

Perl Weekly Challenge 268: Magic Numbers

These are some answers to the Week 268, Task 1, of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on May 12, 2024 at 23:59). This blog post provides some solutions to this challenge. Please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

Task 1: Magic Number

You are given two arrays of integers of same size, @x and @y.

Write a script to find the magic number that when added to each elements of one the array gives the second array. Elements order is not important.

Example 1

This week in PSC (123) | 2023-11-09

We skipped the meeting last week (2023-11-02). This week was a quiet week too, so we don’t have much to report.

We talked a bit about the PPCs currently being implemented. PPCs 14 (English names) and 21 (optional chaining) have people implementing them - we hope to have some progress to publish soon.

Get more from you constants with constant::more

One of my 'nuts and bolts' modules is constant::more. It declares constants, just like constant , however also gives you the ability to set these values in a consistent way from the command line or environment variables.

This can give module authors constants with 'default values', and allow the top level application code to override from the command line if they choose.

This has worked well for my needs to date. I've just released v0.3.0 with some additional features I feel make it even more useful and might make it more useful for others:

Flat list of for multiple constants

Originally I made the interface only work like constant for simple use cases. This meant multiple constants had to be inside a hash ref of actually multiple use constant::more... lines.

use constant::more {CONST1=>1, CONST2=>2};

Now a flat list is usable, which I personally find much more appealing:

use constant::more CONST1=>1, CONST2=>2;

Enumerations

Announcing Dancer Core Team Changes

We’re excited to announce that Ruth Holloway (GeekRuthie) has joined the Dancer Core Team.

Ruth is a longtime user of Dancer2, and has been one of our most vocal supporters in the greater Perl community. She’s responsible for a number of excellent additions to the Dancer2 ecosystem, and is an active member of our wonderful community.

Please join us in welcoming Ruth to our team. We’re looking forward to her continued contributions to the framework and community.

In other news, Steven Humphrey has retired from the Core Team. We’re grateful for his contributions to Dancer2, and wish him well in his future endeavors.

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