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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • Mirodir@discuss.tchncs.detoProgrammer Humor@programming.devSus
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    5 days ago

    Sure. You have to solve it from inside out:

    • not()…See comment below for this one, I was tricked is a base function that negates what’s inside (turning True to False and vice versa) giving it no parameter returns “True” (because no parameter counts as False)
    • str(x) turns x into a string, in this case it turns the boolean True into the text string ‘True’
    • min(x) returns the minimal element of an iterable. In this case the character ‘T’ because capital letters come before non-capital letters, otherwise it would return ‘e’ (I’m not entirely sure if it uses unicode, ascii or something else to compare characters, but usually capitals have a lower value than non-capitals and otherwise in alphabetical order ascending)
    • ord(x) returns the unicode number of x, in this case turning ‘T’ into the integer 84
    • range(x) creates an iterable from 0 to x (non-inclusive), in this case you can think of it as the list [0, 1, 2, …82, 83] (it’s technically an object of type range but details…)
    • sum(x) sums up all elements of a list, summing all numbers between 0 and 84 (non-inclusive) is 3486
    • chr(x) is the inverse of ord(x) and returns the character at position x, which, you guessed it, is ‘ඞ’ at position 3486.

    The huge coincidental part is that ඞ lies at a position that can be reached by a cumulative sum of integers between 0 and a given integer. From there on it’s only a question of finding a way to feed that integer into chr(sum(range(x)))


  • When were talking about teaching kids the alphabet we need to train both individual and applied letters

    This is only slightly related but I once met a young (USAmerican) adult who thought the stripy horse animal’s name was pronounced zed-bra in British English and it was really hard to convince her otherwise. In her mind zebra was strongly connected to Z-bra, so of course if someone was to pronounce the letter “zed” it would turn into “zed-bra” and not just into “zeh-bra”.