TL;DR

Here we are with TASK #1 from The Weekly Challenge #127. Enjoy!

# The Challenge

You are given two sets with unique integers. Write a script to figure out if they are disjoint. The two sets are disjoint if they don’t have any common members.

Example

Input: @S1 = (1, 2, 5, 3, 4)
@S2 = (4, 6, 7, 8, 9)
Output: 0 as the given two sets have common member 4.

Input: @S1 = (1, 3, 5, 7, 9)
@S2 = (0, 2, 4, 6, 8)
Output: 1 as the given two sets do not have common member.


# The Questions

It might be interesting to understand if there is any limit on the inputs, e.g. how many items in each set and/or if the values can have restrictions (e.g. a lower and a upper bound).

Depending on the answer, there might be different implementation choices. For example, if there are so many elements that they cannot fit in memory, then some file-based solution might be wise, e.g. by sorting the inputs first and then comparing them for intersection (which might lead to anticipatedly exiting the comparison loop in case the two sequences indeed have a common element).

We will assume that all inputs fit in memory and that, in general, memory is not an issue in our case.

# The Solution

Raku has core support for sets, so it would be a waste not to use it. Which is what is done in the following solution:

#!/usr/bin/env raku
use v6;
sub MAIN (*@args) {
my @sequences = @args.map: *.split(/\D+/).Set;
put ([(&)] @sequences) ?? 0 !! 1;
}


We assume to get the two lists from the command line arguments, a single string each that is looked for non-digit characters to act as separators. The result is turned into a Set because we want to do some set operations, right?

This is actually a more general approach where we might want to put more lists inside, and see if they are all disjoint. For this reason, we use a map to get all inputs that we are given.

The reduction (meta)operator [(&)] implements the actual intersection across all sets. Doing this is overkill, because technically speaking we don’t have to compute the whole intersection, just find whether one intersection exists. Whatever, we’ll save this for Perl.

Due to precedence, the call to the reduction operator has to be embedded in round parentheses; its result is used to generate the output as requested.

The Perl alternative is… different. In it, we actually build one single set-equivalent from one sequence (that is the ultra-flexibile hash) and then check the elements from the other sequence for matches in the first one:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use v5.24;
use warnings;
use experimental 'signatures';
no warnings 'experimental::signatures';

sub disjoint_sets ($seq1,$seq2) {
my %flag = map { $_ => 1 }$seq1->@*;
for my $e ($seq2->@*) { return 0 if exists $flag{$e} }
return 1;
}

say disjoint_sets(map { [split m{\D+}mxs] } @ARGV);


As an afterthought, actually, we can observe that the inputs specification makes it clear that elements are never repeated in each sequence, so we might even simplify like this:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use v5.24;
use warnings;
use experimental 'signatures';
no warnings 'experimental::signatures';

sub disjoint_sets ($seq1,$seq2) {
my %flag;
for my $e ($seq1->@*, $seq2->@*) { return 0 if$flag{\$e}++ }
return 1;
}

say disjoint_sets(map { [split m{\D+}mxs] } @ARGV);


I’m not entirely sure it’s better - just simpler, I guess. It only checks for duplicates in the whole thing, keeping track of them as it goes.

And with this… stay safe folks, and have -Ofun!