Space Age

Instructions

Given an age in seconds, calculate how old someone would be on:

• Mercury: orbital period 0.2408467 Earth years
• Venus: orbital period 0.61519726 Earth years
• Earth: orbital period 1.0 Earth years, 365.25 Earth days, or 31557600 seconds
• Mars: orbital period 1.8808158 Earth years
• Jupiter: orbital period 11.862615 Earth years
• Saturn: orbital period 29.447498 Earth years
• Uranus: orbital period 84.016846 Earth years
• Neptune: orbital period 164.79132 Earth years

So if you were told someone were 1,000,000,000 seconds old, you should be able to say that they're 31.69 Earth-years old.

If you're wondering why Pluto didn't make the cut, go watch this YouTube video.

Note: The actual length of one complete orbit of the Earth around the sun is closer to 365.256 days (1 sidereal year). The Gregorian calendar has, on average, 365.2425 days. While not entirely accurate, 365.25 is the value used in this exercise. See Year on Wikipedia for more ways to measure a year.

You might find Pharo dictionaries useful in completing this exercise. Pharo has several ways to construct dictionaries, including Dictionary new: at:put: and a literal syntax using Associations. An Association looks like key -> value and can be turned into a dictionary like this: { 'key' -> 'value' } asDictionary. Remember that in Smalltalk, all infix operators are right-associative and that you can browse any of the classes mentioned above live.

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Source

Partially inspired by Chapter 1 in Chris Pine's online Learn to Program tutorial.