TL;DR

On with TASK #2 from The Weekly Challenge #198. Enjoy!

The challenge

You are given an integer $n > 0.

Write a script to print the count of primes less than $n.

Example 1

Input: $n = 10
Output: 4 as in there are 4 primes less than 10 are 2, 3, 5 ,7.

Example 2

Input: $n = 15
Output: 6

Example 3

Input: $n = 1
Output: 0

Example 4

Input: $n = 25
Output: 9

The questions

… are we allowed to use modules?

The solution

The question, just for a change, is not to nag our fine host Mohammad S. Anwar. It’s just that the good old Math::Prime::Util by Dana Jacobsen contains function prime_count, which needs just a little interface adaptation (i.e. subtracting 1):

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use ntheory 'prime_count';
print prime_count(($ARGV[0] // 10) - 1), "\n";

It’s so compact that this time I decided to get rid of all the Perl programs boilerplate, including the use v5.24 (so I had to revert back to print, as say is not available by default) and use warnings.

To compare and contrast, the Raku alternative is equivalently short. I’m not aware of an implementation of prime_count, but there’s a primality test out of the box and it’s easy to put it at work:

#!/usr/bin/env raku
sub prime-count ($n) { (2 ... $n).grep({.is-prime}).elems }
put prime-count((@*ARGS[0] // 10) - 1);

I decided to keep the same interface as its Perl counterpart (including the need to subtract 1 before calling it in our case), for consistency.

I’m not sure how efficient this prime-count function is, to be honest. I tried to sneak a ... for lazy list generation, but I’m not sure that using grep and then counting the objects is the right approach memory-wise. Maybe something like this is a bit less idiomatic but also less resource taxing:

sub prime-count ($n) {
   my $count = 0;
   for 2 ... $n -> $k { ++$count if $k.is-prime }
   return $count;
}

Anyway, the first implementation is OK for little test inputs, so I’m sticking with it.

Stay safe!