HHC 2022 - Programming Contest - no responses until after 6am Monday 6am CENTRAL

[Gerson W. Barbosa]

(09-11-2022 09:11 PM)3298 Wrote:  No libraries at all sounds hard ... because quite a few built-in commands are from libraries!
For instance, HEAD and TAIL are commands 81 and 82 in library 171. Such builtin library commands make an unnecessary (in my opinion, anyway) minefield out of this challenge.

On the other hand Gene says "RPL: The HP-50G built-in functionality, no libraries attached, nothing extra. Vanilla."

To my knowledge, HEAD and TAIL are available since the HP-28S (C?). I think the restriction refers to third-party libraries and pure RPL (no SysRPL, no Assembly).
Mine doesn’t comply to Gene’s final requirements, except for the 50 cycle limitation. Despite this simplification, the byte count is around 200. I’d tried to replace the initial DO UNTIL END structure with WHILE REPEAT END, but that only made it slower and longer. The 30-step example takes 22 seconds, which doesn’t appear too long for me, though. The 6-step sample cases takes about 1.7 seconds.