I suppose. I haven't gotten the answer back yet, but I suppose it's a done deal, since I went WELL over the expected time limit on my 'C Programing' test (it was supposedly 3-6 hours, and I called it a wrap at twelve).
It was (again) one of those cutesy algorithm tests. This one was 'play Scrabble' (you had to make a program that would play Scrabble, and put out the certified best results).
Now, I suck at Scrabble most of the time, anyway. I've got an enormous vocabulary, true, but I've never really tried to win at it, so I don't spend a lot of time strategizing on it.
In fact, I don't spend time strategizing on games, period. I love games. I don't take any of them seriously (they're games, yano?). I'm absolutely awful at 'twitch' games (things that you have to run with a joystick). I've never solved a single level of anything except Enigma and Lemmings (can't really count the 'Sim' games, since 'winning' isn't something that they do).
If it wasn't for the 'cheat' keys, I never could have debugged the games I worked on, in other words. In real games, I die a lot.
Still, I enjoy wandering in a 'world' that someone else made, even if I'll be stuck wherever I am till I find the instructions to tell me how to leave (I'm really good at searching the web for answers to game questions).
I suppose I should not spend too much time musing on it, since it's a non-starter.
I've still, in all these years of being *tested* this way (lots of companies have offered this kind of *test* over the years), NEVER have run across a situation in *reality* that even approached the kinds of weird shit that people thought up as tests.
On the other hand, I've run across quite a few situations in reality that, if they were set up as a test, would probably irk the tested. Some actual issues are more curious than manufactured ones.
And honestly, in twenty-one years of doing this stuff, I've NEVER used C to process strings (lines of text). It's an AWFUL language for working with text, and even when I worked at Origin, when I had to work with strings, I used PROPER string programming language tools, because the development time issue (with C, you pretty much have to dictate every level of the text creation, including remembering to put a '0' at the end to show that it's 'done').
Even in 1993, I had SED and AWK to work with. I used them back then instead of C. When Perl 5 came out, I switched.
All day yesterday, I kept wanting a 'foreach' loop and push/poppable string arrays. It's in all the current languages I'm working with.
You have to write all that yourself in C. It's just *slightly* less wordy than Assembler.
If I'd been a programmer working with strings in C for the last twenty years, I'd likely have had lots of little library snippets to grab to work with in the test.
But I'm too lazy to spend all that time re-re-reinventing a perfectly good wheel. I use Perl.
So I had to make them all up yesterday (essentially starting by re-writing Perl's string functions in miniature).
But it took so long to re-invent that wheel that I didn't get to the actual algorithm till way past the due date.
Oh well.
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