Weekend challenge

[J. Landman Gay]

On 7/1/13 12:53 AM, Geoff Canyon wrote:
> Okay, this is a beast, and in no way good or generalized. It doesn't use
> the previous function, instead just going through line by line and flagging
> all the issues it sees in one pass.

<snip>

Thanks Geoff, I'll definitely look it over. I actually won't have to use 
it though because I was excused from the exercise, the server is doing 
it instead. But it bugged me that I couldn't write a nice, neat handler 
to do it.

The backstory: The client wanted a data verification check performed on 
both the server and in the LiveCode stacks. I spent a weekend toiling 
over this, I probably wrote six or eight different versions using 
different methods. I never did produce anything neat and compact, so the 
next Monday I asked the server person how they did it. They replied with 
a four or five line algorithm which was very close to one of my initial 
attempts, but they didn't have to do any duplicate checking. Apparently 
there's a way in Rails to do that easily. They were bouncing arrays 
around. A couple of my attempts used arrays but looping through all the 
sub-keys wasn't any easier than just looping through the list.

I was feeling kind of miffed that they were able to produce a workable 
script in a couple of hours and I'd been messing with it for days. 
Fortunately the client said never mind, they would just use the one on 
the server, and that I should move on to other things.

I was not disappointed, but it did leave me feeling kind of stupid (and 
a little defensive about LiveCode.) I was relieved that no one here 
jumped in to say "oh, just do this". But I still wonder if I was missing 
some cool trick.

-- 
Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com