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The official awful.systems Advent of Code 2023 thread
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a,b
So, like many other problems from this year, this is one of those direct solution problems where there isn't much of a neat trick to getting the answer. You just have to implement the algorithm they specify and hope you can do it correctly.a) I used a regex to do some parsing because I haven't looked at dart regex much and wanted to dip my toes a little.
I considered doing this "properly" with OO classes and subclasses for the different rules. I felt that it would be too difficult and just wrote something janky instead. In hindsight, this was probably the wrong choice, especially since grappling with all the nullable types I had in my single rule class became a little too complex for my melting brain (it is HOT in Australia right now; also my conjunctivae are infected from my sinus infection. So my current IQ is like down 40 IQ points from its normal value of probably -12)
b) There may have been a trick here to simplify the programming (not the processing). Again, I felt that directly implementing the specified algorithm was the only real way forward. In brief:
Because this is AOC, I assumed that the input would be nice and wouldn't have anything problematic like overlapping ranges, and I was right. I had a very stupid off by one error that took me a while to find as well.
The code I have up as of this comment is pretty long and boring, I might try clean it up later.
Replying in OP: Yeah, Lemmy punishes old threads/posts a bit too much for my taste ^^.
Good note for next year!
update: have cleaned up the code.