TL;DR

On with TASK #2 from The Weekly Challenge #173. Enjoy!

The challenge

Write a script to generate first 10 members of Sylvester's sequence. For more informations, please refer to the wikipedia page.

Output

2
3
7
43
1807
3263443
10650056950807
113423713055421844361000443
12864938683278671740537145998360961546653259485195807
165506647324519964198468195444439180017513152706377497841851388766535868639572406808911988131737645185443

The questions

Where does manwar take inspiration for all these challenges?

The solution

I don’t know why, when there are challenges about generating sequences there are two different clicking things in my head:

• the Perl personality goes for iterators;
• the Raku personality goes for classes.

Go figure.

This time was no exception, so here we get the Perl thing:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use v5.24;
use warnings;
use experimental 'signatures';
no warnings 'experimental::signatures';
use Math::BigInt;

my $it = sylvester_sequence_it();
say $it->() for 1 .. shift // 10;

sub sylvester_sequence_it {
   my $n;
   return sub { $n = $n ? 1 + $n * ($n - 1) : Math::BigInt->new(2) }
}

We have to use [Math::BigInt][] even for the number of elements asked by the challenge, which is unusual but anyway welcome. There are not that many calculations to do, so the performance toll is negligible.

Raku is different and supports your-memory-is-the-limit sizes from the start:

#!/usr/bin/env raku
use v6;

class sylvester-sequence { ... };
sub MAIN (Int:D $count = 10) {
   my $ssq = sylvester-sequence.new();
   put $ssq.next for 1 .. $count;
}

class sylvester-sequence {
   has $!n;
   method next { $!n = $!n ?? 1 + $!n * ($!n - 1) !! 2 }
}

In both cases I went for taking the overhead of a boolean check instead of adopting a different solution, like cache-and-calculate:

my $retval = $n;
$n = 1 + $n * ($n - 1);
return $retval;

Or, more succintly:

((my $retval, $n) = ($n, 1 + $n * ($n - 1)))[0]

Well, first the latter succint alternative sucks because it’s unreadable and I haven’t even tried it; second I don’t really like pre-calculating the next value, it’s a little pet-peeve in which I feel like I’m wasting resources calculating at least one value that I’m not going to use.

Anybody knows a good psycologist? A really good one please?

Stay safe!