While I do encourage you to answer this with some fantastic new online service (please provide me with an account and the best e-book reader device available once you’re rich) I had a try at answering this question myself a while ago by writing the Calc macro for Moin.

Basically, the Calc macro allows extracting values found in a wiki page into lists (think columns or rows), and applying formulas and further formatting as wanted.

I believe there’s a lot of potential on the basic concept, and the prototype, even though functional and useful, surely has a lot to evolve, so I’ve published the project in Launchpad to make contributions easier. I actually apologize for not publishing it earlier. There was hope that more features would be implemented before releasing, but now it’s clear that it won’t get many improvements from me anytime soon. If you do decide to improve it, please try to prepare patches which are mostly ready for integration, including full testing, since I can’t dedicate much time for it myself in the foreseeable future.

The implemented algorithm will find the shortest, correctly rounded output string representing a decimal number that converts to the same internal binary floating-point number when read.

Update: the download link is now fixed.

Have fun!

This week’s problem is not specially challenging though. The problem name is Turn the page, and consists of the following question:

A novel has 527 pages (pages 1 – 527). How many digits will it take to number all 527 pages from 1 to 527?

How many people wouldn’t know how to solve that? Solving with eyes closed is kind of fun, but with help from a calculator or from any programming language it’s trivial. In python, that single line does the job:

sum([len(str(i)) for i in range(1,527+1)])

Let’s hope for a more interesting problem next week. There are some good problems from previous weeks available as well.

The interpreter is currently 1076 lines long, and is based on a tokenizer for the grammar, a compiler which creates a list of trees of expressions, an interpreter for the generated structure, and two modules for symbol maintenance and matrix operations.

Here is a quick example:

a = 2*3+4/2
print(a)

b = [1,2,3|4,5,6]
c = [1,2,3|4,5,6]
print((b+c)/2)
print(trans(b))

d = [1,0|-2,3|5,4|0,1]
e = [0,6,1|3,8,-2]
print(d*e)

f = [1,2|3,4]
print(det(f))
f = [2,3,4|-5,5,6|7,8,9]
print(det(f))
f = [1,-4,2,-2|4,7,-3,5|3,0,8,0|-5,-1,6,9]
print(det(f))

And here is the output:

8
[ 1, 2, 3 | 4, 5, 6 ]
[ 1, 4 | 2, 5 | 3, 6 ]
[ 0, 6, 1 | 9, 12, -8 | 12, 62, -3 | 3, 8, -2 ]
-2
-45
2042