From Newsgroup: comp.lang.awk

On 06.11.2023 13:54, Ed Morton wrote:

On 11/5/2023 1:04 PM, Janis Papanagnou wrote:

Fast pre-calculated solutions can also be legible.

Apparently we just have different ideas of legible

(This makes no sense; given what I said here and what you say below.)

The advantage of the pattern approach is, though, that it matches
exactly the specification/definition[*], as the cases are typically
explained. - But I think it's boring to talk on that "ideas" level.

- to me a hash lookup
is the clear and obvious way to implement this rather than a bunch of
if/else regexp comparisons.

Taking the idea of your variant further can simplify it even, e.g.

function nth_pre (num)
{
if (num ~ /[^0-9]/) return num
return num e[num%100]
}
[...]

That's a very good idea. [...]

Yes, it's simple and legible. - No unnecessary 'if' cases and no hash
arrays ("huns" and "tens") that introduce unnecessary complexity
where you need only a single and clear mapping of the relevant digits.

Janis

[*] See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_suffix

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