From: David Alan Black <dblack@...>
Date: 2001-07-19T21:08:05+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:18112] exercise in minimalism: diamonds

Hello --

For those who enjoy and/or learn from this kind of thing (I do both),
here's another minimalizing exercise:

Write a program which, given a positive integer argument n, prints a
diamond pattern (see below) whose widest line is n characters wide.

Example:

diamonds 5

=>
  #
 ###
#####
 ###
  #

diamonds 4

=>

 ##
####
 ##

(I guess that's what it has to do for even numbers.)

I got this down to a fit 54 bytes in Perl, though I never posted the
puzzle to clp.misc so I don't know what Randal might have done with it
:-).  I haven't tried it in Ruby yet -- I'm taking the Tom Sawyer
approach.


David

-- 
David Alan Black
home: dblack@candle.superlink.net
work: blackdav@shu.edu
Web:  http://pirate.shu.edu/~blackdav