Talk:Box the compass

General

The naming sequence was more complex than I originally thought. I started by coding up a generic quarter of the points but North and South take precedence over East and West in some of the orderings and so I had to 'reflect' a quarter, quarter1 to make quarter2 in the Python solution.

P.S. Couldn't help the Pirate speak :-)

--Paddy3118 21:43, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

I chose to just put in a list of all the packed representations (which are very slightly modified from the official abbreviations to add hyphens). The fact that I don't have to do a lot of quoting of the strings makes this a very attractive option in Tcl. –Donal Fellows 10:10, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

I like the way you've done it. Coding all 32 points is done so compactly and you skip all the logic for choosing quarters. Neat! --Paddy3118 12:53, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

In my VB.net implementation I chose to build the list of points into an array beforehand and keep it separate from the calculation subroutine. It was implemented in a similar way to the Python routine otherwise. Admittedly, it'd probably have been more efficient just to write the list of points straight into the array, but would have been far less interesting that way! --TheMadman 13:31, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

For J, I decided to do the simple thing, and then I fix the result by preventing the text of the first word from appearing multiple times in multi-word names. --Rdm 15:35, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

Capitalization?

The Wikipedia article capitalizes, for example, "Southwest by south". However, a google search shows that as a general rule the capitalization will be either "southwest by south" or "Southwest by South". The Wikipedia capitalization could be rationalized as the lower case variation as it would appear at the beginning of a sentence... Anyways, perhaps the task description should either explicitly require one form of capitalization (and I do not much care which, though the Wikipedia form seems awkward) or should explicitly state that capitalization is a non-issue? --Rdm 14:50, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

The current J implementation abuses the information contained in the wikipedia capitalization to deal with one of the wording quirks. (I would prefer to get rid of that abuse but do not want to code so generally that I am explicitly parameterizing and supporting all three forms of capitalization -- at least not if the task does not require it.) --Rdm 15:10, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

Hi Rdm, What is important is matching the capitalisation of the wp table. But I just looked at the capitalization from the OED, which seems to point to south being lower cased for cardinal points, (except when starting a sentence of course). --Paddy3118 15:39, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

I would argue that the capitalisation is a bit of a non-issue. Strictly speaking, the cardinal directions are not proper nouns therefore shouldn't really be capitalised. I did capitalise mine in the same way as the Wikipedia entry simply because it just wouldn't have looked right otherwise, but I did make sure that the capitalisation subroutine acted on the direction names at display time, not on insertion into the array. --TheMadman 15:32, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

It should appear as in the wp table. Other capitalisations wouldn't be following the task description. --Paddy3118 15:39, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

Absolutely, although if you look at the example at the bottom of the page, the Wikipedia entry does put "east by north" in lower case, suggesting that it's done in the table purely for aesthetics (which, in those circumstances, is probably the correct way to write it), hence my argument of non-issue. --TheMadman 15:50, 28 March 2011 (UTC)