Re: Interview question

On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 11:22 AM, CRPence <crpbottle@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 30-Jun-2016 09:27 -0500, John Yeung wrote:

<<SNIP>> I suppose the verbiage of the instructions contains
cultural, educational, and linguistic biases, the same way many,
many standardized test questions do. <<SNIP>>

I suspect that their choice of the term /delimited by/ is one such
example. I eventually concluded that, most likely, they meant to have used
the term /separated by/.

IME the computing vernacular has defined the former term as fully
enclosing the boundaries [of the string of alpha characters for this
scenario], such that both beginning and end must have the non-alpha; their
example, "Automotive"->"A6e" seemed to emphasize that intention. I consider
the latter term to imply only one boundary of the string of alpha
characters, either the beginning or the end, need be demarcated by a
non-alpha; e.g. with comma _separated_ values, wherein some of the values
additionally may be _delimited_ to avoid a reader mistaking a
separator-character that is embedded within the delimited-value, as an
actual separator-character denoting the next value.

Chuck, your constant striving for verbal precision astounds me, and I
am one of the most verbally precise people I know.

I actually did not fully understand what you said. There were bits of
it that seemed incontrovertible to me; but not enough that I could be
100% sure of everything you were trying to express.

Are you saying that, to you, a "delimiter" is something that must
appear in pairs, with one on either side of what's being delimited;
whereas a "separator" is something that just sits between the two
items it's separating, with no requirement or implication of pairing?

In my experience and estimation, the term "delimiter" includes the
role that commas play in CSVs, and indeed you will often find CSV
files referred to as "comma-delimited". In an Excel-flavored CSV, the
quotation mark is never
*called* a delimiter, even though of course it delimits something, in
the English sense of the word "delimit". So commas and quotes are both
delimiters (broadly speaking), but they delimit different things and
have different semantics.

Out of curiosity, which definition did you use, for the solution you
started coding? Did you ever imagine any alternatives to your first choice?
I would guess that if your first inference was /separated by/, then no other
alternative definitions were considered.?

Same as the comma in a CSV; no; correct.

If the first interpretation of
/delimited by/ is a requirement to enclose, then the programming task has a
number of error cases to which no allusions were made in the
rules\description of the problem domain.

The line between reasonable and unreasonable focus on details and
technicalities is of course fuzzy and subjective. Part of the
meta-game is figuring out where the interviewer has drawn that line.
For example, maybe there is some
interviewer out there who *is* looking for a response along the lines
of "since there is no such thing as a method in RPG, I can't write
one, nor can anyone else".

But if the quiz is really meant to have an actual, working, running
RPG solution, I just don't think there is much to be gained by
penalizing a solution that makes the very customary assumption that
the beginning and end of a string serve as implied word boundaries.
Someone who asks for clarification on that point shouldn't be
penalized either, though.

John Y.