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Triangle

Triangle

Easy

Instructions

Determine if a triangle is equilateral, isosceles, or scalene.

An equilateral triangle has all three sides the same length.

An isosceles triangle has at least two sides the same length. (It is sometimes specified as having exactly two sides the same length, but for the purposes of this exercise we'll say at least two.)

A scalene triangle has all sides of different lengths.

Note

For a shape to be a triangle at all, all sides have to be of length > 0, and the sum of the lengths of any two sides must be greater than or equal to the length of the third side.

In equations:

Let a, b, and c be sides of the triangle. Then all three of the following expressions must be true:

a + b ≥ c
b + c ≥ a
a + c ≥ b

See Triangle Inequality.

Dig Deeper

The case where the sum of the lengths of two sides equals that of the third is known as a degenerate triangle - it has zero area and looks like a single line. Feel free to add your own code/tests to check for degenerate triangles.

Running and testing your solutions

From the command line

Simply type 8th test.8th. It is assumed that the 8th binary is declared in the PATH environment variable.

From a REPL

Start 8th loading test-words.8th and your solution file: 8th -f test-words.8th -f triangle-tests.8th This will start a CLI session where you can run tests interactively by copying and pasting them in from triangle-tests.8th or by entering your own.

Editing the triangle-tests.8th file

This is encouraged at the beginning of your journey. Insert a back-slash space before all but the first one or two tests. Write your code to solve the first test or two. Then progressively enable more tests until you can pass all of them.

Last updated 15 March 2023
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