XXX Interview Coding Test - Instructions
Built with .NET 7.0.
What is this?
This is the solution to an interview coding test I wrote for a contract I never applied for - a friend & I were talking about it and I thought I'd give it ago!
Included below is a screenshot of my results followed by the instructions, but the major thing to note is I built this in .Net 5.0 .Net 7.0 not .Net 4.6.1 or less - so i guess I failed already :)
What the instructions doesn't tell you is to use the supplied input.txt data file and execute instruction 100:
Instructions
Your challenge is to write highly performant C# code that can correctly evaluate a list of instructions, the code should give the ability to be able to swap instruction format (label: instruction type items), should we wish to, for another unknown/undisclosed format along with the ability to support adding new or changing the supported instruction types.
- Every instruction in the supplied file has a label specified by number followed by a colon e.g. "4:"
- There are 3 instruction types in the supplied file:
1) Value x - Returns the value x
2) Add <labels> - Evaluates the instruction at each label in <labels> and adds the result together
3) Mult <labels> - Evaluates the instruction at each label in <labels> and multiplies the results together
<labels> is a list of one or more numbers that refer to the label of other instructions in the input.
- The overall result for a set of instruction is the result of evaluating the first instruction.
For example, given the input:
0: Add 4 4 1
1: Mult 6 2
2: Value -3
3: Add 6 1 2
4: Value 5
6: Value 2
The first instruction is "Add 4 4 1", and the overall result is 4, which is produced as follows:
Add 4 4 1
-> Add (5) (5) (Mult 6 2)
-> Add (5) (5) (Mult (2) (-3))
-> Add (5) (5) (-6)
-> Add (10) (-6)
-> (4)
Challenge: What is the overall result of evaluating the instructions in the input.txt file?
Further guidance: - As a rough guide, we expect you to spend around a couple of hours on this exercise. - Make sure to document any assumptions that you make. - Provide your answer, along with the code you have written and time the code takes to calculate the result. - The solution should be zipped up (excluding binaries) and all source returned, this must be able to build in VS2017/19 using .NET >= 4.6.1. - Your solution should log the time taken to evaluate each set of instructions, as well as the overall time to compute the full set of instructions. - Addtionally please document/implement the solution in such a way as to allow for extending the solution to support differing instructions sets.