Rockstar Rainfall Problem

I had to write a Rockstar program. FizzBuzz was done so I decided to try the Rainfall Problem:

Write a program that will read in integers and output their average. Stop reading when the value 99999 is input.

Here’s my program:

My hopes are nothing
The future is nothing without my hopes

Listen to the sky
Until the sky is decimated, destroyed; sparkling, sinuously perfected
Build my hopes up
My dreams are the sky with the future
They are my dreams
Listen to the sky

If my hopes ain't nothing
shout the future over my hopes

If my hopes are nothing
whisper the future of my hopes

It’s damn tricky! The first block initialised the counter (my hopes) and the sum (the future) to zero (nothing). I subtracted zero from zero for the second line to add a little variation.

Getting 99999 so it would scan and make sense was very hard. I don’t think it quite worked, but it’s not an unbearable stretch. Rather too much alliteration.

The averaging sounds a bit odd. I did guard against no input, yay!

Unfortunately the Python transpiler isn’t very complete. Here’s the raw output:

my_hopes are False
the_future = False - my_hopes
the_sky = input()
while not the_sky == decimated, destroyed; sparkling, sinuously perfected:
    my_hopes += 1
    my_dreams are the_sky + the_future
    They are my_dreams
    the_sky = input()
if my_hopes != False:
    shout the_future / my_hopes
if my_hopes are False:
    whisper False

So, it doesn’t understand are or nothing properly and doesn’t handle poetic number literals. Easy enough to hand fix:

my_hopes = 0
the_future = 0 - my_hopes
the_sky = int(input())
while not the_sky == 99999:
    my_hopes += 1
    my_dreams = the_sky + the_future
    the_future = my_dreams
    the_sky = int(input())
if my_hopes != 0:
    print(the_future / my_hopes)
if my_hopes == 0:
    print(0)

Note that since Python 3.x replaced input with raw_input (and threw away Python 2.x’s input, I had to add a manual cast around the read. I think the semantics of Rockstar’s listen has to be more like old input otherwise you couldn’t input numbers.

Anyway! There you go!

(I didn’t filter negative numbers since the problem as stated in the linked paper puts that as an elaboration. That would be a PITA to handle :))

It’s clear that there needs to be more synonyms and esp “null” words i.e., words which just get dropped.

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