On 12/5/2012 1:27 PM, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
>
> I would expect that for this example question, you would be very
> hard-pressed to construct a program inefficient enough to be considered
> "too slow". ;-)

That's because you're not thinking like someone who has no idea what 
they're doing.

Take for instance the following algorithm, which I *tried* to make mimic 
the sort of answer a clueless person might stumble and grope their way 
to after hours of trial and error.  I couldn't manage make the coding 
style quite bad enough to be realistic, but you'll get the idea.  I did 
at least manage to put in a bug or two which ends up working due to 
blind luck.

example of use:

sortInts("5000 353 1  145 145  145 354 23 16564")


the (horrible horrible) code:



def sortInts(S):
	i = 0
	count = 0
	while count < countSpaces(S)+1:
		n = countInStr(i, S)
		if n > 0:
			for j in range(n):
				print i
				count += 1
		i += 1

def countInStr(n, S):
	S = " " + S + " "
	count = 0
	for i in range(len(S)):
		for j in range(i,len(S)):
			if S[i-1:j+1] == " " + str(n) + " ":
				count += 1
	return count
	
def countSpaces(S):
	count = 0
	wasLastSpace = False
	for i in range(len(S)):
		if S[i] == " ":
			if wasLastSpace == False:
				count += 1
				wasLastSpace = True
		else:
			wasLastSpace = False
	return count

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