From: Matthew Moss <matthew.moss@...>
Date: 2008-08-01T23:45:17+09:00
Subject: [QUIZ] Code Heuristics (#172)

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## Code Heuristics (#172)


This week, your task is to make my job simpler.

Each week, coders send in their submissions to Ruby Quiz problems,
usually as a mix of quiz discussion and actual code. Your task, then,
is to take a submission as input, and generate output that is the
extracted code. Every line of the input that isn't code should be
prefixed with the comment marker, `#`.

Take the following submission to quiz #158:

    I may have missed it, but I didn't see this solution:

    require 'enumerator'
    "Hello world!\n".enum_for(:each_byte).inject($stdout) { |res, b|
      res << b.chr
    }

    Which in 1.9 looks much better:

    "Hello world!\n".each_char.inject($stdout) { |res, c|
      res << c
    }

    Stefano

Your code should take that as input and generate this output:

    # I may have missed it, but I didn't see this solution:

    require 'enumerator'
    "Hello world!\n".enum_for(:each_byte).inject($stdout) { |res, b|
      res << b.chr
    }

    # Which in 1.9 looks much better:

    "Hello world!\n".each_char.inject($stdout) { |res, c|
      res << c
    }

    # Stefano

Assuming you knew for certain which lines should be commented and
which should not, your submission would be little more than a
glorified `cat`. This quiz is more about identifying Ruby-looking
text: what heuristics or patterns will you use to determine what lines
or groups of lines are Ruby code or not.

Fortunately, there is a large sample set from which you can
experiment: all existing Ruby Quiz submissions. Unfortunately -- for
this quiz, not in general -- Ruby is very dynamic and flexible, which
can make code identification a difficult problem. So I am not
expecting perfection here, but I want to see what tricks, or general
process, you can come up with for this problem.

Extra credit: Provide an optional command-line argument to "split" the
output into multiple files. Each separate file would be a different
chunk of the code, where code is separated by discussion. Commented
discussion should be kept with the code that follows it.


-- 
Matthew Moss <matthew.moss@gmail.com>