If you don’t know what PHP is, ignore this post and all others like it. If you do know, welcome to the VKPS PHP Scripting Challenge. Each week I’ll be asking people to create a script that solves a particular problem using the PHP scripting language. Quite simple really. It should help people think about efficient coding and improving their skills generally.
The first challenge is: Create a function that takes in two positive integers (whole numbers)and returns the greatest common divisor (GCD) of both. For those who don’t know, the GCD is the largest whole number which will divide another two integers exactly.
For example, 2 and 4 have GCD 2 (since 2 is the highest integer that divides them both exactly). 3 and 10 have GCD 1 and so forth.
So, any 2 positive integers will be passed in as parameters and your function should return an integer that is the GCD of them both. Send your functions to me at Solitude@vkps.co.uk. Easy!
Here are the rules:
- The winner is the person who writes the shortest script that works on sample integers that I will run on it,
- All functions must return a value,
- All functions submitted are considered public domain and hence can be reproduced and used with or without credit to anyone by anyone (so no bitching if someone rips off your script after the challenge finishes),
- The winning script will be archived here for prosperity and to help others,
- New rules may be added here at any time,
- GCD(0,0) is technically odd to define (some argue it should be 0), and hence ANY returned value for this case will be accepted (including no returned value),
- My decision is final, but the shortest (file size) script will be the winner
Closing date is: Monday, 24th February 2003. But if a better script is submitted over time it will be archived too (just not acknowledged as winning). Have fun.