Question around code day 17
omarjuul opened this issue · comments
Hey there, I'm not sure if this is the place to ask stuff like this, but I have a question about your code for day 17. If there is a better place to ask questions then I apologize and please direct me to it :)
I'm trying to learn a bit of the go language by viewing your code, so I'm wondering if there's something I'm misunderstanding:
Line 70 in ef5485f
Is the initialization here actually doing anything? It seems to me that the increment a few lines down also hits keys that have not been initialized by this loop (yet). Am I missing something?
(As an aside: I think you eliminated the need for the ActiveNeighbors() method (is it called a method in go?) when you introduced the neighCount map, so that might not be needed in the code anymore?)
Not sure if this is seen so I'll ping @lizthegrey ...
Is the initialization here actually doing anything? It seems to me that the increment a few lines down also hits keys that have not been initialized by this loop (yet). Am I missing something?
Ah, the reason for this is that normally golang defaults missing keys to 0 on first access, but there is a difference between explicitly set vs missing keys for iteration purposes. Down below, I need the range neighCount to contain any active cells, even those that have 0 active neighbors, so that we can properly turn off singletons that have drifted off on their on and should be turned off :)
(As an aside: I think you eliminated the need for the
ActiveNeighbors()method (is it called a method in go?) when you introduced theneighCountmap, so that might not be needed in the code anymore?)
Good catch. Yes, the function can be eliminated.