# PyTux

## Trips of a curious penguin.

Go to the Heartbleed test!

# Callback-based combinations (in Go)

Let’s have a look at this task: generate all the combinations of k elements out of N. That is, all the unordered k-tuples made of elements from a pool of length N. See Wikipedia for more.

An example of an application: if you are bruteforcing two misspellings in a password, the optimal set of couples of characters to bruteforce at the same time is the set of all the combinations of 2 characters out of the password.

There are a number of ways you can do this in code. Algorithm-wise you have to choose between a recursive approach and an iterative one. The recursive one might be more immediate for some people, but it does. Not. Scale. (Recursion limit reached anyone?) Also in some languages function calls are really expensive.

However what this article is about is how to grab the output. First you have to decide whether to return k-tuples of indices in 0 – N-1 or of actual pool elements.

For example with a pool of elements of qwerty and a k of 2, you can decide to return values like (q, t) and (t, y) or (0, 4) and (4, 5).

My opinion is that you should always prefer the indices:

• to return actual elements you have to pass the pool to the algorithm;
• you can reuse a set of indices over two same-size pools;
• for some tasks you can avoid the work of extracting the values from the pool by index all the times (e.g. if you filter them);
• by returning elements you lose information about their index that might be irrecoverable (if there are duplicates in the pool) or expensive to recover (O(N));
• sometimes, well, you just need the indices.

Then, you can think to a number of approaches here:

1. just return an array or a set of all the combinations
2. yield them (if you have support for generators)
3. call a callback on each one
4. plainly process them where you generate them

I prefer by far the callback approach:

• it is supported in much more languages than generators;
• can be used elegantly and succinctly with anonymous functions;
• doesn’t require k*N memory, you can just filter or process them on the fly;
• you can build any other approach over it, e.g. by passing a append function as the callback;
• by using closures you can share the callee scope;
• keeps your code DRY.

So, code! Here are the Go snippets for combinations with and without repetitions. Most of it was translated to Go from the Python documentation and adapted according to the contents of this article.