I broke two rules:
- I did not use a JVM-based language, because.
- I assume that your example implies that all last children are depicted with "_" which would mean that your example has a typo.
Other comments: *) I saw the potential for infinite loops, so I stop a branch before it repeats. *) I worked on this under distractions (at a conference) for about four hours. I capture that output under "four_hour_output.txt" and I mark the approximate progress line in the code with a comment to that effect. *) I also spent an additional hour under the same conditions and captured a 'complete' solution under "five_hour_output.txt" *) My preference is to write code like this in separate modules, but here I stuck to the Elixir convention of leaving it bound in one file. In this case, it makes for a better code narrative, since each function is written in order of successively transforming the input into the desired ASCII output. Read it like a story.
To run:
*) Install Elixir if you don't have it already. brew install elixir works quite well.
*) Checkout the code https://github.com/clr/mcgarr or download a zip directly from https://github.com/clr/mcgarr/archive/master.zip and unpack it.
*) From the directory where you unpack the attached, run mix run -e McGarr.homework If you are unfamiliar, mix is similar to rake but will compile and run the program. The solution output should print to the terminal.
*) TDD. All code is documented and tested with doctests, which are awesome. To run the doctests, run mix test from the directory where you unpacked the attached. It will compile the code, extract the tests from the documentation, and run them.