Code Golf: Easter Spiral
- by friol
What's more appropriate than a Spiral for Easter Code Golf sessions? Well, I guess almost anything.
The Challenge
The shortest code by character count to display a nice ASCII Spiral made of asterisks ('*').
Input is a single number, R, that will be the x-size of the Spiral. The other dimension (y) is always R-2. The program can assume R to be always odd and = 5.
Some examples:
Input
7
Output
*******
* *
* *** *
* * *
***** *
Input
9
Output
*********
* *
* ***** *
* * * *
* *** * *
* * *
******* *
Input
11
Output
***********
* *
* ******* *
* * * *
* * *** * *
* * * * *
* ***** * *
* * *
********* *
Code count includes input/output (i.e., full program).
Any language is permitted.
My easily beatable 303 chars long Python example:
import sys;
d=int(sys.argv[1]);
a=[d*[' '] for i in range(d-2)];
r=[0,-1,0,1];
x=d-1;y=x-2;z=0;pz=d-2;v=2;
while d>2:
while v>0:
while pz>0:
a[y][x]='*';
pz-=1;
if pz>0:
x+=r[z];
y+=r[(z+1)%4];
z=(z+1)%4; pz=d; v-=1;
v=2;d-=2;pz=d;
for w in a:
print ''.join(w);
Now, enter the Spiral...
