how to get the ordinal number in list
Roy Smith
roy at panix.com
Sun Aug 10 13:10:21 EDT 2014
In article <b5ac5b12-cda7-464e-9c14-63ef184a7a10 at googlegroups.com>,
Rustom Mody <rustompmody at gmail.com> wrote:
> > They haven't figured out yet that the
> > first step to solving a problem is to decide what algorithms you're
> > going to use, and only then can you start translating that into code.
> > They need to be led in small steps towards basic knowledge.
> [...]
> In my view this is starting from the wrong end.
> I do not need to know which kind of adder the hardware is implementing to
> use +, which sorting algorithm to use sort, etc.
Well, no, but if the problem is, "Find the 5 largest numbers in a list",
you might start solving the problem by thinking, "OK, first I'm going to
sort the list into descending order, then I'm going to take the first
five items from that"(*) Only then would you get down to "OK, how do I
sort a list of numbers in this language", and "OK, how do I select the
first five items from a list in this language". That's what I mean by
first you come up with an algorithm, then you implement it in code.
(*) Yes, I know, that's not the optimum way, but it's a reasonable first
attempt.
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