Hello:

I write a logic/math puzzle each week. They appear in my blog (http://genew.ca/) and two local newspapers.

Here is the latest problem:

"Consider a date in YYYY-MM-DD format. What is the next date where all eight digits will be different?"

I solved this by hand. I decided to verify my solution with a program. I often cook up something in GW-BASIC, but since VFP has date functions, I decided to go with it.

It was very easy to set up the framework of the loop. What threw me for a loop is how to check that all of the digits are different. I ended up converting the date to string with dtos() and then testing the string with a rather ugly-looking condition. Is there something faster?

***** Start of Code ***** * 16s-16.prg * Date Puzzle * Last Modification: 2016-07-17 * * Consider a date in YYYY-MM-DD format. What is the next date where all * eight digits will be different?

? "*** Execution begins." ? program() close all clear all

set talk off set exact on set century on set date ansi

*

local startdate startdate=date()

? "Start Date: "+transform(startdate)

local trydate, looping trydate=startdate looping=.t. do while looping

local trydtos trydtos=dtos(trydate) if right(trydtos,4)="0101" ? "Working on year "+left(trydtos,4) endif

if; iif("0"$trydtos,1,0)+; iif("1"$trydtos,1,0)+; iif("2"$trydtos,1,0)+; iif("3"$trydtos,1,0)+; iif("4"$trydtos,1,0)+; iif("5"$trydtos,1,0)+; iif("6"$trydtos,1,0)+; iif("7"$trydtos,1,0)+; iif("8"$trydtos,1,0)+; iif("9"$trydtos,1,0)#8 trydate=trydate+1 else && solution looping=.f. endif

enddo

? "Solution is "+transform(trydate)+"."

*

close all clear all ? "*** Execution ends." return ***** End of Code *****

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko