Re: Seriation

On 12/02/2025 23:41, Ben Bacarisse wrote:
<snip>

But this does raise a
question I don't recall being asked...  Do you remember why you
hand-coded a character set

Yes. :-)

rather than just taking it to be ASCII 33 to
126 (inclusive)?

Cast your mind back, if you will, to the dark days of the second millennium, when small furry creatures from Alph... [Ach, sod poetry, it's almost 4am.]
Not hard-coding ASCII values into the source was mere habit; I only ever hard-coded when I couldn't avoid it (eg when converting between character sets), because it was a source of non-portability that 99.99(+)% of the time I simply didn't need.

That would have made the code a bit simpler.  All that
occurs to me is that you might have done so to make it more fun reverse
engineer.  But then I can imagine you might have mixed up the order of
some the more obvious runs (like A to Z to 0 to 9) to make it even more
so.

It would have been (and remains) very easy to do, in fact - just fiddle with the #defines at the top. But one must know when to stop, or one risks turn a mild teaser into the head-scratching challenge it was never my intent to make it.

Good to see you back, by the way...

Thank you. Thunderbird just stopped playing sillybuggers... again...
--
Richard Heathfield
Email: rjh at cpax dot org dot uk
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999
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