pascal

About

pascal is a small CLI tool for printing out the first n rows of Pascal's Triangle.

Usage

There are several options you can pass to pascal:

~ % pascal -h
Usage: pascal [options]
    -n, --num_rows=NUM_ROWS          Number of rows in triangle
    -s, --num_space=NUM_SPACE        Number of spaces between adjacent cells
    -p, --padding=PADDING            Left-padding to help center triangle
    -d, --diamond                    Print as a diamond
    -h, --help                       Print out usage information

Examples

Basic

Specify the number of rows using the -n option:

~ % pascal -n5
         1
        1 1
       1 2 1
      1 3 3 1
     1 4 6 4 1

Adding spacing between cells

You can use the -s option to specify the number of spaces between cells:

~ % pascal -n5 -s3
         1
       1   1
     1   2   1
   1   3   3   1
 1   4   6   4   1

Adding extra padding

Depending how many rows you are printing, you may encounter some padding / centering issues. For example:

~ % pascal -n10 -s3
         1
       1   1
     1   2   1
   1   3   3   1
 1   4   6   4   1
1   5   10   10   5   1
1   6   15   20   15   6   1
1   7   21   35   35   21   7   1
1   8   28   56   70   56   28   8   1
1   9   36   84   126   126   84   36   9   1

This is clearly not desirable output. You can fix it using the -p option as follows:

~ % pascal -n10 -s3 -p45
                      1
                    1   1
                  1   2   1
                1   3   3   1
              1   4   6   4   1
           1   5   10   10   5   1
        1   6   15   20   15   6   1
      1   7   21   35   35   21   7   1
   1   8   28   56   70   56   28   8   1
1   9   36   84   126   126   84   36   9   1

Printing as a diamond

You may desire to reflect Pascal's triangle across the final row. You can do it using the -d option:

~ % pascal -n5  -d
         1
        1 1
       1 2 1
      1 3 3 1
     1 4 6 4 1
      1 3 3 1
       1 2 1
        1 1
         1

Questions / comments / concerns

Shoot me an email at: ant@antfeedr.com.

Contributing

Feel free to contribue to this project. Fork the repo and open up a PR with your changes!

hernanat/pascal