Just do what is fast in your particular language. Order of elements within a combination by definition does not matter.

I thought that give up meant I was supposed to use fold!

Haha, now that really sent me barking down the wrong alley...

We all did those

In retrospect, this was a pretty stupid way to approach the problem...

Wait... I thought this was Fortran. I don't even know why. This is pretty embarrassing.

Oooh. Scala's pattern match-lambda (?) syntax looks neat.

This is very pretty.

I could swear that I tried that...

Made me laugh!

What "creativity" are you talking about? This kata is super tight to allow only one solution for a good reason. In fact anything less tight will make it lose the point. If you're looking for "creativity" here, I'm afraid your princess is in another castle.

Kata best practice only says tests should be written so that a solution passes IIF it follows the requirement. It does not say a solution should pass if it is good enough. I know you don't like such katas (you don't like the multi-line task katas either, so...), but they exist for a good reason. Just move on, and give up like said in the description. You can't solve every kata on CW, and it's telling you to give up for exactly this reason. It's really your personal style issue and you should git gud instead.

Resolving because it's not a suggestion.

I agree with JohanWiltink. IMO this is rather a "gimme-the-single-possible-solution-kata". "Golfing-with-restrictions" katas would be way more interesting and fun. Haskell is a perfect language for this type of katas with all the fancy operators and abstractions.

golfing is an activity of throwing everything you can use into the code to make it shorter :)

Ok, but even golfing katas should allow some variability/creativity either by relaxing the code length or by multiple possible shortest solutions.

Regards,

suic

I don't think I can, mainly because it's already approved and relaxing it will change the perceived difficulty a lot. (Looks like people think finding that exact solution is as easy as 6 or 7kyu already...)

Also, "forbid the obvious solution" isn't a very good option - golfing is an activity of throwing everything you can use into the code to make it shorter :)

Anyway, I guess I'll leave the suggestion open. Any improvement ideas are welcome.