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The algorithm for doing long division in Roman numerals is one of those things that's educational but you're not sure it was actually worth learning, but it pro
by User23 4y ago
The algorithm for doing long division in Roman numerals is one of those things that's educational but you're not sure it was actually worth learning, but it probably was.
- Joker_vD 4y agoWell, considering that most of the schools don't teach that algorithm... it almost surely wasn't worth learning it.
- johannes1234321 4y agoThere are .ultiple ways in which a thing can be worthwhile. I don't know that algorithm, but generally I take joy from similar things, so maybe I will look it up. It's now on my list.
- mfragin 4y agoOf course, but only for nerds like me. Reminds me of the old joke about regular expressions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25415441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25415441 Roman numerals were easy to chisel into stone. Beyond that, kind of a headache.
- User23 4y agoYeah. True regular expressions, which is to say the Kleene kind, are a lovely tool for testing membership in a given regular grammar. However what we call regexes today are, often, a considerably more theoretically powerful tool that can match some[1] non-regular languages. Programmers are tempted to use them as a general purpose matcher, which they absolutely are not. Thus, the punchline of the joke. [1] As far as I know the exact computational power of perlre isn't proved, but it can describe some subset of the context-free languages at the very least.
- EdwardDiego 4y agoIt helps for (sigh) coding tests in interviews. People looove roman numeral based problems for some reason.
- User23 4y ago"Everything worth learning is taught in most schools" is a remarkably bold claim. Would you be willing to please offer some support for it?