A more idiomatic Raku solution

A couple of days ago I published a straightforward solution to the Task 2 of Week 75 of The Weekly Challenge.

Despite that solution perfectly works, I wasn’t satisfied with it and wanted a more Raku-ish code. Here is the next iteration of it.

my @hist = 3, 2, 3, 5, 7, 5;

my $max = 0;
for (^@hist).combinations(2) -> ($x, $y) {
    $max = max($max, min(@hist[$x .. $y]) * ($y - $x + 1));
}

say "The area of a biggest rectangle is $max.";

If you looked at the output of the previous variant, you may have noticed that the ranges in the loop resemble the number combinations from Task 1 of Week 67. And that’s the hart of this solution:

(^@hist).combinations(2)

This simple line gives us what we need: all the possible sub-histograms (well, maybe except the single-column ones):

0 .. 1
0 .. 2
0 .. 3
0 .. 4
0 .. 5
1 .. 2
1 .. 3
1 .. 4
1 .. 5
2 .. 3
2 .. 4
2 .. 5
3 .. 4
3 .. 5
4 .. 5

The rest is simple. Find the area of a rectangle by multiplying the width of the window by the maximum common height of the histogram bins in it:

$max = max($max, min(@hist[$x .. $y]) * ($y - $x + 1));

Run the program to confirm it works and prints the correct result:

$ raku ch-2a.raku 
The area of a biggest rectangle is 15.

* * *

→ GitHub repository
→ Navigation to the Raku challenges post series