A polyglot experiment.
A long time ago I read a great article in Server/Workstation Expert entitled High-School Algebra, Backwards. In it the authors introduce Gregory's Theorem, a method for computing polynomials from an integer sequence. A perl implementation is provided.
Now, whenever I am learning a new programming language, one of the first things I try to implement is a solver for Gregory's Theorem. It's simple enough in theory that all of my time can be spent on finding the most idiomatic way to express the solution for each language.
Some of the things I get to play with:
- Implement factorial
- Implement a new datatype
- Functions to operate on that new datatype
- Syntactic sugar for data structures
- Iteration v. recursion v. declarativityness
For Java, run mvn test
For Clojure, run lein repl
For Python, cd to src/main/python/gregory and run python -i GregoryTests.py
For Ruby, cd to src/main/ruby/gregory and run ruby gregory_tests.rb