TL;DR

On with TASK #2 from the Perl Weekly Challenge #115. Enjoy!

The challenge

You are given a list of positive integers (0-9), single digit.

Write a script to find the largest multiple of 2 that can be formed from the list.

Examples

Input: @N = (1, 0, 2, 6)
Output: 6210

Input: @N = (1, 4, 2, 8)
Output: 8412

Input: @N = (4, 1, 7, 6)
Output: 7614

The questions

Well… there are a few nitpicks:

• let’s say we’re focusing on single-digit inputs, not necessarily positive (or 0 would be out of the game)
• let’s also assume that there will always be an even element in the list!

The solution

This is the solution in Perl:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use 5.024;
use warnings;
use experimental qw< postderef signatures >;
no warnings qw< experimental::postderef experimental::signatures >;

sub largest_multiple (@N) {
   @N = sort { $a <=> $b } @N;
   for my $i (0 .. $#N) {
      if ($N[$i] % 2 == 0) {
         my ($last) = splice @N, $i, 1;
         return join '', reverse(@N), $last;
      }
   }
   return;
}

my @inputs = @ARGV ? @ARGV : qw< 1 0 2 6 >;
say largest_multiple(@inputs);

We first sort the list bottom to top, then extract the first even item we find. What is left will have to be reversed (so that we can find the largest) and that even item put at the end. Yay!

This is the Raku version:

#!/usr/bin/env raku
use v6;

sub largest-multiple (@N is copy) {
   @N = @N.sort: {$^a leg $^b};
   for 0 ..^ @N.elems -> $i {
      next if @N[$i] % 2;
      @N.unshift(@N.splice($i, 1).Slip);
      return @N.reverse.join('');
   }
   return;
}

sub MAIN (*@inputs is copy) {
   @inputs = < 1 0 2 6 > unless @inputs.elems;
   say largest-multiple(@inputs);
}

That’s all folks!