Dimitri John Ledkov: Go enjoy Python3
Given a string, get a truncated string of length up to 12.
The task is ambiguous, as it doesn't say anything about whether or not 12 should include terminating null character or not. None the less, let's see how one would achieve this in various languages.
Let's start with python3
In C things are slightly more verbose, but in essence, I am going to use strncpy function:
Finally we have Go
12 points for python3, 8 points for C, and Go receives nul points Eurovision style.
EDIT: Andreas R ssland and James Hunt are full of win. Both suggesting fmt.Printf("%.12s\n", os.Args[1]) for go. I like that a lot, as it gives simplicity & readability without compromising the default safety against out of bounds access. Hence the scores are now: 14 points for Go, 12 points for python3 and 8 points for C.
EDIT2: I was pointed out much better C implementation by Keith Thompson - http://pastebin.com/5i7rFmMQ in essence it uses strncat() which has much better null termination semantics. And Ben posted a C implementation which handles wide characters http://www.decadent.org.uk/ben/blog/truncating-a-string-in-c.html. I regret to inform you that this blog post got syndicated onto hacker news and has now become the top viewed post on my blog of all time, overnight. In retrospect, I regret awarding points at the end of the blog post, as that's just was merely an expression of opinion and is highly subjective measure. But this problem statement did originate from me reviewing go code that did "if/then/else" comparison and got it wrong to truncate a string and I thought surely one can just do [:12] which has lead me down the rabbit hole of discovering a lot about Go; it's compile and runtime out of bounds access safeguards; lack of universal Min() function; runes vs strings handling and so on. I'm only a beginner go programmer and I am very sorry for wasting everyone's time on this. I guess people didn't have much to do on a Throwback Thursday.
The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent Intel s positions, strategies, or opinions.
The task is ambiguous, as it doesn't say anything about whether or not 12 should include terminating null character or not. None the less, let's see how one would achieve this in various languages.
Let's start with python3
Simple enough, in essence given first argument, print it up to length 12. As an added this also deals with unicode correctly that is if passed arg is , it will correctly print . (note these are just random Unicode strings to me, no idea what they stand for).
import sys
print(sys.argv[1][:12])
In C things are slightly more verbose, but in essence, I am going to use strncpy function:
This treats things as byte-array instead of unicode, thus for unicode test it will end up printing just . But it is still simple enough.
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
void main(int argc, char *argv[])
char res[12];
strncpy(res,argv[1],12);
printf("%s\n",res);
Finally we have Go
This similarly treats argument as a byte array, and one needs to cast the argument to a rune to get unicode string handling. But there are quite a few caveats. One cannot take out of bounds slices. Thus a na ve os.Args[1][:12] can result in a runtime panic that slice bounds are out of range. Or if a string is known at compile time, a compile time error. Hence one needs to calculate length, and do a min comparison. And there lies the next caveat, math.Min() is only defined for float64 type, and slice indexes can only be integers and thus we end up writing ]))))])...package main
import "os"
import "fmt"
import "math"
func main()
fmt.Printf("%s\n", os.Args[1][:int(math.Min(12, float64(len(os.Args[1]))))])
12 points for python3, 8 points for C, and Go receives nul points Eurovision style.
EDIT: Andreas R ssland and James Hunt are full of win. Both suggesting fmt.Printf("%.12s\n", os.Args[1]) for go. I like that a lot, as it gives simplicity & readability without compromising the default safety against out of bounds access. Hence the scores are now: 14 points for Go, 12 points for python3 and 8 points for C.
EDIT2: I was pointed out much better C implementation by Keith Thompson - http://pastebin.com/5i7rFmMQ in essence it uses strncat() which has much better null termination semantics. And Ben posted a C implementation which handles wide characters http://www.decadent.org.uk/ben/blog/truncating-a-string-in-c.html. I regret to inform you that this blog post got syndicated onto hacker news and has now become the top viewed post on my blog of all time, overnight. In retrospect, I regret awarding points at the end of the blog post, as that's just was merely an expression of opinion and is highly subjective measure. But this problem statement did originate from me reviewing go code that did "if/then/else" comparison and got it wrong to truncate a string and I thought surely one can just do [:12] which has lead me down the rabbit hole of discovering a lot about Go; it's compile and runtime out of bounds access safeguards; lack of universal Min() function; runes vs strings handling and so on. I'm only a beginner go programmer and I am very sorry for wasting everyone's time on this. I guess people didn't have much to do on a Throwback Thursday.
The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent Intel s positions, strategies, or opinions.
I attended DebConf 15 last week. After being on semi-vacation from Debian for the last few months, recovering after the end of my second DPL term, it was great to be active again, talk to many people, and go back to doing technical work. Unfortunately, I caught the debbug quite early in the week, so I was not able to make it as intense as I wanted, but it was great nevertheless.
I still managed to do quite a lot:
Yeah I know, a bit ironic that this isn't available over HTTP-S.
I could reuse the mail server certificate to make
https://decadent.org.uk/ work...
Like 
A good amount of the Debian 
I tried to start to write this blog entry like I usually do: Type along what goes through my mind and see where I'm heading. This won't work out right now for various reasons, mostly because there is so much going on that I don't have the time to finish that in a reasonable time and I want to publish this today still. So please excuse me for being way more brief than I usually am, and hopefully I'll find the time to expand some things when asked or come back to that later.
Part of the reason of me being short on time is different stuff going on in my private life which requires additional attention. A small part of this is also something that I hinted in a former blog entry: I switched my job in June. I really was looking forward to this. I made them aware of what the name Rhonda means to me and it's definitely extremely nice to be addressed with female pronouns at work. And also I'm back in a system administration job which means there is an interest overlap with my work on Debian, so a win-win situation on sooo many levels!
I'm at 
Well, here are the stats for the final week of the 
Pevious articles are here: 
Thursday was our big day: After more than 2.5 years of working in the
hidden, ups and downs, 
I bumped into Mark Shuttleworth today at Linuxcon and we had a brief conversation about Canonical's IP policy. The short summary:
Dear Lazyweb,
I m currently trying to find a way to port 
Just came back from a wonderful time hiking with my daughter at the finale 
