Summary

New tag for "limited solutions"

Discussion

In some instances, it may not be possible for a language to provide an exact match solution to the task, due to limitations of the language or its utilized subcomponents. It might be a good idea to have a "limited solution" marker would be a good idea. (Similar to the "incorrect solution" tag), that reads something like 'The solution provided does not meet the exact specifications of the task, due to limitations of the language or its subcomponents. The author has tried to provide an "approximate fit" or "best fit" solution based on those limitations'. I know there are tasks on the wiki, where the solutions is a close approximation, rather than an exact fit. This might be quite useful. This would give better scope for making comparisons of languages, because it would be possible to see the limitations of the language and it tools for a particular task, (rather than the implementation being simply omitted, giving us nothing to use for evaluation of the language at all). Markhobley 09:55, 24 July 2011 (UTC)

Unfortunately, the example for which you would like to add the tag: Pi#GUISS is reason to reject the notion as one gain so little when comparing that language example with the others. That page would be better if the GUISS example were dropped altogether. In light of this, I would rather we continue our current "ad-hoc" methods as we don't currently have a need to go beyond that. --Paddy3118 12:36, 24 July 2011 (UTC)

There are some other examples: some of the timer related tasks, file handling tasks, I think some of the UNIX shell solutions, Unix/Windows incompatibilities, levels of support with different concepts, etc. I'll paste any that I find. Markhobley 14:23, 24 July 2011 (UTC)

The REXX solution for "Flatten a List", works with a string representing a list rather than a list itself. That is a close approximation (and acceptable IMHO). Markhobley 16:43, 24 July 2011 (UTC)

We could just have a policy that allows approximations, if an exact fit is not available, providing that the solution states the limitations and any differences in behaviour from the task requirements. Markhobley 16:49, 24 July 2011 (UTC)