here’s a more nuanced question: in school iirc my teacher was implementing terminal 2-human tic-tac-toe with us and used an only slightly less egregious 7-by-3 AND/OR gate to see whether any player had won. because I didn’t like all the repetition, my version iterated through a 7-by-3 list of lists of indecies instead. every toy programming problem I’ve seen since was so general that it didn’t go well with this kind of hardcoding either
When creating an example for beginning programmers, sometimes using a very inefficient data structure is more illustrative and a helpful educational tool.
here’s a more nuanced question: in school iirc my teacher was implementing terminal 2-human tic-tac-toe with us and used an only slightly less egregious 7-by-3 AND/OR gate to see whether any player had won. because I didn’t like all the repetition, my version iterated through a 7-by-3 list of lists of indecies instead. every toy programming problem I’ve seen since was so general that it didn’t go well with this kind of hardcoding either
When creating an example for beginning programmers, sometimes using a very inefficient data structure is more illustrative and a helpful educational tool.