Typo in Hamming instructions

BNAndras · August 7, 2024, 12:38am

exercism/problem-specifications/blob/main/exercises/hamming/description.md

# Description

Calculate the Hamming Distance between two DNA strands.

Your body is made up of cells that contain DNA.
Those cells regularly wear out and need replacing, which they achieve by dividing into daughter cells.
In fact, the average human body experiences about 10 quadrillion cell divisions in a lifetime!

When cells divide, their DNA replicates too.
Sometimes during this process mistakes happen and single pieces of DNA get encoded with the incorrect information.
If we compare two strands of DNA and count the differences between them we can see how many mistakes occurred.
This is known as the "Hamming Distance".

We read DNA using the letters C,A,G and T.
Two strands might look like this:

    GAGCCTACTAACGGGAT
    CATCGTAATGACGGCCT
    ^ ^ ^  ^ ^    ^^

This file has been truncated. show original

“We read DNA using the letters C,A,G and T” should be “We read DNA using the letters C, A, G and T”.

“They have 7 differences, and therefore the Hamming Distance is 7.” could probably be “They have 7 differences, therefore the Hamming Distance is 7” since therefore is an conjunctive adverb. I’d rather fix the C,A,G and T spacing though.

The text uses both Hamming Distance and Hamming distance in a few spots so it’d be good to be consistent throughout. Hamming distance - Wikipedia uses Hamming distance so I’d favor that casing personally.

IsaacG · August 7, 2024, 2:46am

I’m a bit surprised Wikipedia does it that way, but I’m not about to argue with Wikipedia. I’m down for a PR to fix that.

BNAndras · August 14, 2024, 5:04am

github.com/exercism/problem-specifications

Update hamming text

exercism:main ← BNAndras:update-hamming-text

opened 05:04AM - 14 Aug 24 UTC

BNAndras

+5 -5

Related to https://forum.exercism.org/t/typo-in-hamming-instructions/12412. I… added spaces around the commas on line 14 and adjusted the casing for Hamming Distance consistently. The description uses Hamming Distance but the implementation note uses Hamming distance. [Wikipedia refers to it as Hamming distance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamming_distance) so I opted for that here.