Each of us inherits from our biological parents a set of chemical instructions known as DNA that influence how our bodies are constructed. All known life depends on DNA!
Note: You do not need to understand anything about nucleotides or DNA to complete this exercise.
DNA is a long chain of other chemicals and the most important are the four nucleotides, adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine. A single DNA chain can contain billions of these four nucleotides and the order in which they occur is important! We call the order of these nucleotides in a bit of DNA a "DNA sequence".
We represent a DNA sequence as an ordered collection of these four nucleotides and a common way to do that is with a string of characters such as "ATTACG" for a DNA sequence of 6 nucleotides. 'A' for adenine, 'C' for cytosine, 'G' for guanine, and 'T' for thymine.
Given a string representing a DNA sequence, count how many of each nucleotide is present. If the string contains characters that aren't A, C, G, or T then it is invalid and you should signal an error.
For example:
"GATTACA" -> 'A': 3, 'C': 1, 'G': 1, 'T': 2
"INVALID" -> error
Register | Usage | Type | Description |
---|---|---|---|
$a0 |
input | address | null-terminated input string |
$a1 |
input/output | address | null-terminated result string (4 words) |
$t0-9 |
temporary | any | for temporary storage |
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