this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2024
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Advent Of Code
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An unofficial home for the advent of code community on programming.dev!
Advent of Code is an annual Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like.
AoC 2024
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console.log('Hello World')
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J
J really doesn't have hashes! Or anything like hashes! And it's really annoying after a while!
What it does have is automatic internal optimization via hashing of the "index of" operation
m i. n
wherem
is a fixed list (the object being searched) andn
is the query, which can vary. But as soon as you updatem
the hash table is thrown away. And you still have to choose some kind of numeric key, or store a list of boxed pairs where the first coordinate is the key -- effectively this is an old-style Lisp association list, but with extra steps because you have to use boxing to defeat J's automatic array concatenation and reshaping. If you want non-cubical shapes (J calls these "ragged arrays"), or heterogeneous lists, you end up writingu &.>
a lot -- this means "unbox, applyu
then rebox". J arrays are required to be rectangular and homogeneous, but a boxed anything is a single atom just like a number is.It's just a really bad choice of language if you want data structures other than essentially-cubical arrays. On the other hand, once you beat the list manipulation primitives into producing your 1970s Lisp data structure of choice, the rest of the program is as nice as it usually is.