IT Enthusiast — How do you write FizzBuzz?

How do you write FizzBuzz?

You probably know these articles about FizzBuzz: authors point out that many developers (even experienced) are very poor in implementing simplest task when they are interviewed. Example article.

I agree with them heartily - I also meet many people who suck in basic logic and writing basic code. However, now I’m going to have a bit of fun discussing possible implementations. How could this be written? How do you write it? What are common and uncommon ways?

I dare to remind the problem statement: Print integers from 1 to 100, but for each of them divisible by 3 put Fizz instead - and for each divisible by 5 put Buzz instead. If the value is divisible by both - output FizzBuzz.

Let us see. Here is the basic approach (in Python) - it was often written by school pupils when I ask them:

for i in range(1, 101):
    if i % 15 == 0:
        print("FizzBuzz")
    elif i % 3 == 0:
        print("Fizz")
    elif i % 5 == 0:
        print("Buzz")
    else:
        print(i)

What we do not like about this code? it looks like here is more branches than necessary because we check i % 15 case separately. We can make some trick here - printing FizzBuzz as consisting of two parts :

for i in range(1, 101):
    s = ''
    if i % 3 == 0:
        s += 'Fizz'
    if i % 5 == 0:
        s += 'Buzz'
    print(s if s != '' else str(i))

Could this be improved? Or made more funny? Surely! Let us use some arithmetic and small array of answers:

a = ['0', 'Fizz', 'Buzz', 'FizzBuzz']
while a[0] != '100':
      v = int(a[0]) + 1
      a[0] = str(v)
      print(a[(1 if v % 3 == 0 else 0) + (2 if v % 5 == 0 else 0)])

At least this can puzzle your interviewer for a minute or two…

But it is not the end of heresy. A friend of mine, when I told her about FizzBuzz said that she do not remember how modulo operator is written or used. :)

But we can do without modulo, of course! Moreover, here is an example of problem where you can not use modulo (it is hard to implement in the proposed language): FizzBuzz in Asm.

Our second version is the most suitable to be modified for such a case:

cnt3 = 0
cnt5 = 0
for i in range(1, 101):
    s = ''
    cnt3 += 1
    cnt5 += 1
    if cnt3 == 3:
        cnt3 = 0
        s += 'Fizz'
    if cnt5 == 5:
        cnt5 = 0
        s += 'Buzz'
    print(s if s != '' else str(i))

You see, we simply use two counter running up to 3 and 5 instead of using modulo operation - though this makes solution bit longer. But still it could be a useful trick for cases for platforms where division / modulo operations are costly.

So here are a few of my solutions. Would you like to propose some of your own - probably, more funny? Please feel free to paste them in comments!