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exercism / c

Exercism exercises in C.
https://exercism.org/tracks/c
MIT License
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Use of macros in "Series" isn't clear, consideration for removal? #973

Closed Ashvith10 closed 3 months ago

Ashvith10 commented 3 months ago

In the Series exercise, there are a few macros defined that are never used:

#define MAX_INPUT_TEXT_LENGTH (8)
#define MAX_SERIES_RESULTS (MAX_INPUT_TEXT_LENGTH)
#define MAX_SERIES_LENGTH (5)

I've tried checking out a few community solutions, and I haven't seen them being used. Personally, I tried reading the comments in the header multiple time to make sense, but I was never able to understand the use of these macros.

When the number of series (strlen(input_text) - substring_length + 1), as well as the size of each string (substring_length + 1) (both of which will have to be calculated to check for edge-cases mentioned later in the test in the beginning of the function) is already known, wouldn't it be better to consider their removal?

wolf99 commented 3 months ago

From the top of my head, after looking at the exercise meta file, I would say these directives are used only as a way to provide information to the student about the expectations.

The student is then free to either use them or not as they need.

ryanplusplus commented 3 months ago

I agree with @wolf99. I'm going to close this for now. @Ashvith10 if you disagree feel free to reopen this and continue the conversation.