I’m new to Rust, but as a fan of Haskell, I greatly appreciate the way match
works in Rust. Now I’m faced with the rare case where I do need fall-through – in the sense that I would like all matching cases of several overlapping ones to be executed. This works:
fn options(stairs: i32) -> i32 {
if stairs == 0 {
return 1;
}
let mut count: i32 = 0;
if stairs >= 1 {
count += options(stairs - 1);
}
if stairs >= 2 {
count += options(stairs - 2);
}
if stairs >= 3 {
count += options(stairs - 3);
}
count
}
My question is whether this is idiomatic in Rust or whether there is a better way.
The context is a question from Cracking the Coding Interview: “A child is running up a staircase with n steps and can hop either 1 step, 2 steps, or 3 steps at a time. Implement a method to count how many possible ways the child can run up the stairs.”
Based on the definition of the tribonacci sequence I found you could write it in a more concise manner like this:
fn options(stairs: i32) -> i32 {
match stairs {
0 => 0,
1 => 1,
2 => 1,
3 => 2,
_ => options(stairs - 1) + options(stairs - 2) + options(stairs - 3)
}
}
I would also recommend changing the funtion definition to only accept positive integers, e.g. u32
.