Perl6 Integer Sequences Needs You!

The Perl6 library Math::Sequences has quite a lot of utility buried in it, from defining helper functions like binary partitions to the somewhat frivolous FatPi that gives you a rational representation of pi to any desired precision. But at its core is the list of “core OEIS sequences” which are the most widely used sequences of integers.

These sequences include things like the prime numbers, the digits of pi and the sequence of all zeroes. They come in handy for all sorts of important applications and the Math::Sequences library collects them for everyone to use.

There’s just one problme: it’s a lot of work, and we need you to help!

Failing with style

Currently, there are many squences that are defined, but most are just stubbed like this:

# A000005 / divisors
our @A000005 is export = 1, &NOSEQ ... *;

In this example, the A000005 sequence (the “divisors”) is defined as 1, followed by this &NOSEQ thing which generates all of the rest.

It turns out that NOSEQ is defined by our library and just returns a “failure” exception that says “This sequence has not yet been defined.”

The great thing about fialures is that they don’t happen until you try to use the value. So we can improve this stub by giving it the canned values from the OEIS page for the sequence.

our @A000005 is export = 1, 2, 2, 3, 2, 4, 2, 4, 3, 4, 2, &NOSEQ ... *;

How many canned values to grab from the OEIS entry is arbitrary, but I usually try to keep the entry to one, reasonble length line.

But really…

Of course, this is just an improved stub that has some real values people can use, but what we ideally want is the complete list!

So we could define this sequence correctly:

our @A000005 is export = ℕ.map: -> $n {
    factors($n, :self).unique.elems + 1;
};

The factors function is defined in the Math::Sequences::Integers module as a utility helper, though it doesn’t currently have a :self flag, which I’m using notationally here to mean that we include 1 and the $n itself, so that functionality would also have to be added to the factors helper.

How can you help?

What this module needs is two-fold. The firs part can be done by anyone with time. The second part really requires people who know more than high school math and Perl 6 to craft the final implementations of the currently undefined sequences.

So for anyone that has time, here’s what I need:

• Fork the repo https://github.com/ajs/perl6-Math-Sequences on github
• For the sequences currently defined as 1, &NOSEQ ... replace that 1 with a short list from the actual canned values on the OEIS site for that sequence. The canned values should not be too long–try to keep it to a single line of reasonable width.
• Run the tests via perl6 -I lib t/OEIS.t which validates that you didn’t typo anything.
• Save that work on a branch and issue a pull request against my repo with your work.

If you know the math behind a given sequence or can puzzle it out from the description on the OEIS site, then you could actually define the sequence fully and get rid of the &NOSEQ, but both sorts of work are needed.

For the full implementations, don’t be afraid to add helper functions to the module. Each helper should include the is export(:support) modifier if it is something that others would benefit from using.

I’ve already done quite a few of the sequences, but there are a lot of them, and some require more understanding than I have. Your help is greatly appreciated!